What books are on your nightstand?
“The Eighth Life (for Brilka)”, by Nino Haratischvili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin.
“Tideline”, by Krystyna Dabrowska, translated by Karen Kovacik, Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Mira Rosenthal.
‘The Dirt on the Pigpen’, by Charles M. Schulz.
What’s the last great book you read?
Adrienne Rich’s “Blood, Bread, and Poetry” – especially the essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
What book should everyone read before age 21?
To me, “Does this book seem like it could change my life” feels like a more useful question than “Is this a book everyone should read.” I would invite people under 21 to see the world as a quest for life-changing books, with clues everywhere—in other books, on the subway, maybe DailyExpertNews—and then read as much of it as possible. Quantity matters, because books are a product of their time and place, and the toxic ideas of that time are ingrained. Once you’ve read enough, you’ll learn to throw out the toxic parts and keep what helps you.
What book should no one read until the age of 40?
The only reading experience I’ve had after my 40s that feels really inaccessible to my former self is rereading. As in rereading “The Portrait of a Lady” at age 40 and discovering that the most recognizable character is suddenly Madame Merle. When I was 20, I saw Madame Merle as a non-character, a “bad person” who only existed to mess with Isabel. Now I can see both measurements at once, like a magical eye painting.
I think Proust gets better after his thirties. In college I could barely get through ‘Swann’s Way’ or really any ‘literary’ childhood book. I just couldn’t understand why anyone would willingly dwell on such a dull and humiliating time in life. Now, after years of therapy, I can reread “Swann’s Way” and see specifically what the younger I couldn’t handle in childhood.
Your first book, “The Possessed,” was a memoir about your love of Russian literature. Have you tracked, and who are your current favorites?
I have two recommendations for new Russian books in translation: “In Memory of Memory”, by Maria Stepanova, and “Living Pictures” (forthcoming), by Polina Barskova.
I’ve also had some very intense experiences rereading 19th century favorites. For example, after #MeToo, I reread “Eugene Onegin” and “Anna Karenina” and while I could still see everything I loved about those books as a teenager, I also saw a message I wasn’t tuned in to before: something like: “Great literature is about a young woman who ruins her life over a man who isn’t so smart.” Where had such messages led me?
What do you read when you are working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?
I look for books that counter every problem I struggle with in my own work. When I was younger, I struggled a lot with anger, as well as bow. I would experience panic and despair, because it all felt so inescapable. For some reason those feelings melted away when I was reading Haruki Murakami. I must have read “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” at least 10 times.
These days I work more against the tendency to get bogged down by evidence and ideas. Books that have countered that feeling for me include Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and Sheila Heti’s “Pure Color.”
Your first novel, “The Idiot,” followed the protagonist during her freshman year at Harvard. Your new one, “Or/Or”, follows her again, this time during her sophomore year. What other campus novels do you recommend?
Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go.” It’s about an idyllic English boarding school where everyone is doing these amazing art projects, but something seems awry, and gradually you find out that all the students are human clones and their organs will be harvested after graduation. You can read it as a dark allegory for all liberal arts education. I was thinking about this when I was writing ‘Either/Or’. The narrator is aware of living in a charmed bubble where she’s allowed to spend four years cultivating her intellect and specialty – but there’s a lurking fear that none of that is. for whatever, it’s just a temporary Harry Potter fantasy, and soon everyone will graduate and their bodies will be “harvested” to serve biological or economic purposes.
What are your favorite literary sequels?
Part 2 of “Don Quixote”; Proust’s “Time Regained”; Elena Ferrante’s “Those who leave and those who stay” (the third of the Neapolitan novels).
I love it when a sequel doesn’t just continue the events of the previous book, but builds on that book’s existence as an object in the world. By the time Cervantes published Part 2 of “Don Quixote,” Part 1 was so popular that one of Cervantes’ enemies had already published a sequel parody. In part 2, Quixote and Sancho try to refute the fake sequel and deal with the effects of fame in general.
Ferrante’s “Those Who Leaves and They Who Stay” is set amid the political chaos of 1968, with Elena promoting her autobiographical first novel about a fateful crush on teenagers. I reread “Those Who Leave” in the early months of the Trump presidency, when I was doing my PhD mine first novel about an ill-fated teenage crush. Then I decided to write a sequel.
Has a book ever brought you closer to someone else, or come between you?
My partner’s favorite book is ‘Middlemarch’. At the time we met, I didn’t have a very vivid memory of “Middlemarch,” so I decided to reread it. It was so moving to look for what this beloved person had loved in her twenties – almost as if she was hanging out with her younger self. A few times I read passages that made me feel particularly close to her. Later, my partner happened to find her old copy of “Middlemarch”, and it turned out that she had underlined the same passages I had quoted!
What topics would you like more authors to write about?
I hope that more books will be written with the aim of reducing shame, especially childhood shame. I think shame is a huge and underrecognized risk to public health.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which children’s books and writers stay with you the most?
One book I still think about is ‘From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’ by EL Konigsburg, in which two schoolchildren run away from home and hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the perfect fantasy of an autonomous life that is somehow attainable for children. Sometimes when I’m not feeling the magic of New York City, I can still remember that book and evoke the sense of potential that the city had for me at that age.
What book might surprise people when they hit your shelves?
People might be surprised to see a shelf with almost nothing on it except a copy of Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”. I read that book in 2016 and it really changed my life! I have been able to let go of a lot of shame and self-loathing that were trapped in my accumulated possessions. (This meant learning to throw things away without hating myself for being wasteful or ungrateful.) Afterwards, I could feel more joy and gratitude in my surroundings.
How do you organize your books?
I was about to say that now I have so few physical books that I don’t have to organize them. Then I looked at the bookcase and saw Boris Eikhenbaum’s “Tolstoi in the Sixties” next to Boris Eikhenbaum’s “Tolstoi in the Seventies” and Shulamith Firestones “Airless Spaces” next to Edith Wharton’s “The Decoration of Houses”. Chance? Maybe, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you it doesn’t mean anything that “I Love Dick” is next to “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.”
What do you plan to read next?
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, I’ve embarked on a new course to reread/rethink 19th-century Russian classics – this time in light of how they support the ‘idea of an empire’. Next: Pushkin’s “A Journey to Arzrum”, Dostoyevsky’s “House of the Dead”, Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murat” and Edyta M. Bojanowska’s “Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism.”
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
Read novels in bed before going to sleep. I like to read in the dark, I can do that on an e-reader. Occasionally I manage to fall asleep while reading. Then I know I’m living the dream.