My day job involves writing for television, and yet, I find myself spending a lot more time reading books than I do watching TV. A couple of years ago, during the WGA writers’ strike, I became an even more voracious reader. I couldn’t work on my craft, but I could study how other authors mastered theirs. I’d spent my career as a journalist at the New York Times writing other people’s stories, so it felt like a real gift to finally sit down and make up my own. To get in the mood, I read a mix of high and low, fiction and non. I love an audiobook on hikes or in the car, but at night, I want to hold a physical book, preferably from the public library or this fabulous used bookstore in L.A., The Last Bookstore.
In a screenplay, you are always thinking about whether something is producible (i.e., can we really afford this car chase?), but when I set out to write my debut novel, With Friends Like You, I could let my mind, and, by extension, my characters (a.k.a., my imaginary friends), go wild. Here are 10 books that I loved reading—or revisiting—as I set out to write With Friends Like You. I hope they make you laugh and unsettle you, maybe all at the same time. You can throw them in your beach bag or load them onto your Kindle for a flight, or pump them into your veins via AirPods and Audible. Whatever your preferred poison, I hope you love these reads as much as I do.
‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray
‘The Gods of New York’ by Jonathan Mahler
‘The Motherload’ by Sarah Hoover
‘The Virgin Suicides’ by Jeffrey Eugenides
‘The God of the Woods’ by Liz Moore
‘String Theory’ by David Foster Wallace
‘Orange World and Other Stories’ by Karen Russell
‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray
This is one of the most poignant, beautiful and tragic books I’ve read in years. My husband is from a small town in Ireland, so I recognized the very specific backdrop framing the dysfunctional Barnes family. But anyone will relate to this epic family drama, shot through with humor and humanity and brutal, beautiful, fraught, bursting life. (Murray also somehow writes teenage girls better than almost anyone.)
‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
‘The Gods of New York’ by Jonathan Mahler
My novel is set in New York City, and the backdrop is a modern city rife with inequality. Mahler’s riveting history of the city, from 1986 to 1990, reads like a nonfiction Bonfire of the Vanities, and explains in vivid, page-turning detail how New York became such a playground for the uber-wealthy.
‘The Gods of New York’ by Jonathan Mahler.
Random House
‘The Girls’ by Emma Cline
I picked this one up in an English-language bookstore in Vienna when I finished Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel (another banger) quicker than expected. Nobody captures the dreamy loneliness and longing of an adolescent girl quite like Cline, and to use that gift to explore the female side of the Manson Family? Obsessed is too light a word for my feelings about this novel and Cline’s writing. (I also loved The Guest and can’t wait for her next one.)
‘The Girls’ by Emma Cline ‘The Girls’ by Emma Cline.
Random House
‘The Motherload’ by Sarah Hoover
No one has ever articulated new motherhood quite the way Sarah Hoover did in this memoir. It struck a nerve because it’s brutal and honest and unflinching, but also so well written and so laugh-out-loud funny. Her voice is gold.
‘The Motherload’ by Sarah Hoover.
S&S/Simon Element
‘The Virgin Suicides’ by Jeffrey Eugenides
The death of the five Lisbon sisters. The way this novel plays with memory, loss, desire, its dream-like quality, the way it always weaves beauty into tragedy, all of it kept me enthralled and inspired. The book isn’t just about one family’s tragedy, but a fractured community and the grueling complexities of growing up. Damn, Eugenides is good.
‘The Virgin Suicides’ by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Picador
‘All Fours’ by Miranda July
It’s almost a cliché at this point for a woman of a certain age (especially in L.A.!) to recommend this book. But I can’t help it. Who else could take us on a quirky road trip with a detour to a motel room in Monrovia, and somehow also say something so profound about motherhood, sexuality and the things we say goodbye to in middle age?
‘All Fours’ by Miranda July.
Riverhead Books
‘The God of the Woods’ by Liz Moore
I hardly came up for air reading this 500-page thriller set at an Adirondack summer camp. A couple of kids vanish and there’s a serial killer on the loose, yet somehow amid all the mystery, Moore manages to explore class, privilege and family secrets through multiple generations. I am in awe.
‘The God of the Woods’ by Liz Moore.
Riverhead Books
‘String Theory’ by David Foster Wallace
Tennis is part of my writing process, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I can’t sit alone all day with my thoughts if I don’t get outside, sweat and have human company first. So, it felt fitting to read David Foster Wallace’s essays on the sport. I go back to his profile of Roger Federer again and again. Two masters at their game.
‘String Theory’ by David Foster Wallace.
Library of America
‘Orange World and Other Stories’ by Karen Russell
I first read the title short story in The New Yorker when I’d just had my son, and it was a revelation. After that, I dove into Russell’s short stories and her novel, Swamplandia. Her writing is so surreal and strange and yet so human and haunting and also hilarious.
‘Orange World and Other Stories’ by Karen Russell.
Knopf
‘Incidentals’ by Sheila Yasmin Marikar
Sheila writes what I’d describe as “Brown Lotus,” murder mysteries set in luxurious (“aspirational,” as we say in Hollywood) worlds, except all of her characters are South Asian. This latest one, I love. It’s a portrait of a millennial marriage on the rocks disguised as a murder mystery at a seven-star Maldives resort.
‘Incidentals’ by Sheila Yasmin Marikar.
Little A
‘With Friends Like You’ by Amy Chozick
Okay, I had to sneak in a shameless plug for my own debut novel. With Friends Like You is a psychological thriller about female friendship, the parts of ourselves we lose in early motherhood, and the intoxicating people who step in to tell us who we are. I hope it’s a twisty page-turner, but hiding amid the suspense, at its heart, is a novel about the pull of belonging, the versions of ourselves we have to shed in order to survive, and how friendship can both save us and undo us.
‘With Friends Like You’ by Amy Chozick.
Random House
