On your nightstand now:
Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines by Kay Gardiner and Ann Meador Shayne; The Fasting Girl by Michelle Stacey; Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet; Little Women by Louisa May Alcott; Sacred Contracts by Caroline Myss; Autism and the God Connection by William Stillman; Journey of Souls by Michael Newton; Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa by Joan Jacbos Brumberg; and two books on writing: Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream and Naming the World edited by Bret Anthony Johnston. I always have many knitting projects on the needles and many books on my nightstand--both of which drive my husband crazy.
Favorite books when you were a child:
Pretty traditional stuff, I'm afraid: A Wrinkle in Time and Little Women for fiction--although I could never get past Beth's death. I also read a great deal of nonfiction as a kid--biographies of noble achievers that left me feeling very inadequate and laid the foundation for my predisposition for guilt and shame. And there was a series of books by a man whose name I believe was Frank Edwards. I'm sure they're out of print now, but I'd love to find them again. They had titles like Strange But True and recounted supernatural/inexplicable events like spontaneous human combustion and frog downpours. I loved that stuff. Still do.
Your top five authors:
This is a toughie, because any writer I love and have learned from is a favorite. So I'm going to treat this like a "If you were stranded on a desert island" question: J.D. Salinger, Anne Sexton, John Irving, Shakespeare, Ian McEwan.
Book you've faked reading:
I'm terrible at faking, which is too bad since I'm embarrassingly ill-read. If I were inclined to fake having read something, it would surely be something by one of the Russians. I admit to having nodded my head knowingly when the conversation turns to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Actually, I could start faking an acquaintance with Melville if I wanted to, thanks to my kids: the other day at breakfast my sons shocked the hell out of me by reciting, in chorus, the opening lines of Moby Dick. "How do you know that?" I asked, incredulous. They informed me that one of the characters in the Bone books uses Melville as a reliable soporific. However, since I have very little trouble falling asleep these days, I'll probably never get to it. And now I'm outed.
Book you're an evangelist for:
We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. It's hard to evangelize for a book that is so unflinching and dark, but it's an incredible work, one that faces a hot-button, contemporary issue head-on, in all its complexities. It's the most relentlessly truthful and thought-provoking book I've read in years.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Recently Alice Hoffman's The Fourth Angel and a novel called Salvage by Jane Kotapish.
Books that changed your life:
Ironweed by William Kennedy. I found it astonishing. When I put it down, I felt that one could learn everything one needed to know about writing a novel by reading it.
Atonement by Ian McEwan. I still study that book---and all of McEwan's work--because no one has the ability to dive more completely and fearlessly into the heads of characters than he does, to explode a single moment in a person's life in a way that lends it a profound and enduring significance. Atonement also opened up the potential power of storytelling to me in a way that no other book has ever done. That book was an artistic shock to my system; that's the only way I can describe it.
Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. The second time I acted in that play, I played Paulina. The experience was earth-shattering in terms of what it taught me about Shakespeare's use of language, the physicality of it, the power of sounds in and of themselves. It was that play--and the subsequent gift of getting cast in other Shakespearean roles--that taught me that language is gestural. A physical force. Shakespeare still exerts the biggest influence on my work as a writer--he just did everything right.
Favorite line from a book:
"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."--John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Books you most want to read again for the first time:
All of Thoreau; The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand; Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook . . . Really, any of the books I read in my early 20s, because for the most part they were books that weren't mandated by curriculums or given to me by relatives; they were books I found on my own or through friends. These were the books that helped me begin to define myself apart from my parents. I'll also add To Kill a Mockingbird, even though it was required (and controversial) reading at my junior high; every time I read that book it feels like the first time.