Carlene Bauer is the author of the memoir Not That Kind of Girl, published by Harper in July 2009. Her writing has appeared in Salon, the New York Times Magazine and Elle. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is at work on a novel.
On your nightstand now:
Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Jim Carroll's Downtown Diaries (the sequel to The Basketball Diaries). A stained and cracked (but still sturdy) paperback edition of Pierre Franey's The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet that had been owned by my boyfriend's mother, who gave it to us thinking that we would put it to good use. I haven't made anything from it yet, but it's like reading a Laurie Colwin novel: urbanity and the kitchen, circa the late '70s and early '80s, when my mom was feeding me and my sister Hamburger Helper in the suburbs. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which I started and really got into, and thought I had the stamina for, but then, you know... modern life. Or my own damn laziness. It's a draw. Right now that big fat book is holding up a box of Kleenex. I leave it there to mock me.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Anne of Green Gables. Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace coming a close second.
Your top five authors:
Currently: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Flannery O'Connor, Dostoevsky and George Orwell.
Book you've faked reading:
I don't think I ever have faked reading a book. I wish I had that talent for bluffing. I haven't made it through Swann's Way, and writing that puts me in a shame spiral. I'm having trouble with The Magic Mountain, too, all of which makes me think I'm depressingly non-Continental in spirit.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy, written in the '60s--The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss. Austere, frank, elegant, unsentimental but yearning books about two young women who leave the Irish countryside for London and then wrestle with the costs. This is an old story, but O'Brien's version of a girl being stripped of her innocence, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, is devastating. Like a Hardy novel rewritten by an Angry Young Woman.
Book you've bought for the cover:
A version of the Bible packaged for the Jesus Freak generation by Youth For Christ International. The words "Reach Out," not the Holy Bible, take up the whole cover, and the letters are filled with photographs, circa 1968, of thickly side-burned boys in horn-rimmed glasses and girls with ironed hair. The Living New Testament, illustrated, it says--illustrated with more pictures of thickly side-burned guys and long-haired girls, and annotated with helpful thoughts, like this one, about what it was like back in Jesus' day: "Men were sold like lobsters to die for others' amusement." I love that it reads like a tract but looks like a commercial for Hullabaloo.
Book that changed your life:
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Having been raised evangelical, I had no idea one could write a book for God by writing against God, and make it funny to boot. It turned me toward Catholicism.
Favorite line from a book:
Most recently, this piece of advice from Flannery O'Connor's letters: "If you feel poorly, get yourself a jar of GEVRAL. You take it in milk & put some coffee in it. It is for old people. I love it. Geriatrics!"
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I can't think of a book I'd like to read again, but I might like to read Joan Didion's [essay] "Goodbye to All That" for the first time, having now lived in New York longer than she did. When I was 22, I loved the withering, Cassandric tone of the line "It is distinctly possible to have stayed too long at the Fair." I wanted go the Fair and get sick on the rides, too, and come back with that kind of information. But I haven't gotten that kind of sick yet. Woozy, for sure.
