Caroline Leavitt is the author of eight novels and is a columnist for the Boston Globe, a book reviewer for People and a writing instructor at UCLA online. Pictures of You, which will appear as a trade paperback original from Algonquin in January, is the story of two women running away from their marriages who collide on a road on a foggy night. One woman is killed, and the survivor, along with the husband and son of the dead woman, tries to make sense of where that woman was running and why.
On your nightstand now:
The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean. (I'm a science buff and the title alone is irresistible.)
Room by Emma Donoghue. (The premise--about a kid who has lived his whole life in one room--grabbed me.)
Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez. (I so admired The Last of Her Kind, and I love apocalyptic novels.)
Favorite book when you were a child:
I am still enraptured by A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, about proper English children on a pirate ship (spoiler alert!) who wind up deliberately sending their kind pirates hosts to their doom. The first time I read this beauty, I was sick with asthma in the hospital and my beloved eighth-grade English teacher sent the book over to divert me. I was so enthralled that I forgot the oxygen tent and the nebulizers and instead imagined myself on a pirate ship. In fact, I love this particular novel so much, I try to have a character in every one of the novels I write reading it.
Your top five authors:
My list shifts all the time--and there are so many--but right now I'm worshipping Aimee Bender, Dan Chaon, Maile Meloy, Jonathan Evison and Elizabeth Strout.
Book you've faked reading:
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I was young, and I had no idea what I was reading, but I carried the book everywhere and told anyone who asked that I thought it was magnificent. I think faking reading it traumatized me, because I've never attempted to read it since.
Books you're an evangelist for:
I try to make everyone read Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon because it's so unsettling. It reverberates with small shocks. I first read Moving On by Larry McMurtry when I was in a miserable first marriage and wanted to be moving on myself, and I've read it every year since. The Wanderers by Richard Price is a funny, brilliant snapshot of what it means to be young in the New York City projects on the cusp of the 1960s. Plus, Price wrote it when he was just 24!
Book you've bought for the cover:
I've actually never bought a book for the cover! (I always read the first page and the last of any book I'm considering, though, and no, it doesn't spoil it for me to know the end.) I do, however, shy away from books with bodice-heaving sorts of covers, but that's just because they reflect the stories inside, which aren't my taste.
Book that changed your life:
When I was 13 and feeling gawky and unlovely, I read in a magazine that a celebrity model I liked carried around George Orwell's 1984 in her bag. I asked my father to buy me the book in hopes it might make me more model-like, and I was dumbstruck by the first few pages. I couldn't believe how Orwell pulled me into this whole shatteringly different world. He made it so believable and so intense that I couldn't stop reading. I was desperately invested in the story, and instead of caring about the model any longer, I began to care more about being able to write something that good myself.
Favorite line from a book:
The Great Gatsby still knocks me out with the last haunting lines: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
All of them. Truly. But if I had to pick (oh, this is hard), I'd probably say The World According to Garp by John Irving because it was so startlingly fresh and funny and tragic, and all of those surprises would be brand new.