Books That Ruined Me (In the Best Way)

The honest list of books that changed my working life as a writer is not the list I would submit for a “what books influenced you” questionnaire, because the real list is personal and specific and mostly consists of books that produced, in me, some species of temporary madness. The “books that influenced me” genre tends to be aspirational (you pick the titles that make you look serious) or performative (you pick the titles that signal the subculture you want to be read into). This piece is the other kind. The books below did not influence my career. They ruined a specific week of my life each, and the ruin made me write differently afterwards. Here are nine.

**1. Rachel Cusk, Outline (2014).** First in her trilogy (continuing with Transit and Kudos). A novel about a writer who listens, mostly, while other people tell her about their lives on a writing retreat in Athens. The narrator is almost absent. The novel is constructed almost entirely out of other people’s monologues. I read it in three days at age twenty-nine and then could not write fiction for approximately six months, because Cusk had shown me that the entire apparatus of conventional-novel interiority (the close-third narrator, the scene-construction tradition, the protagonist as central consciousness) was optional, and that you could, in fact, write a devastating novel by simply listening well enough. Six months of fiction-silence later, my own fiction came back different, and better, and the transformation was a direct result of Outline. I have reread it three times. It has ruined me three times.

**2. Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019).** A novel in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother. The prose is so dense with lyric compression that you cannot read more than thirty pages in a sitting without needing to lie down. I don’t mean this as a compliment; I mean it literally. Vuong’s sentences carry so much at once (grief, historical violence, adolescent sexual discovery, tenderness, class-inflected shame, physical beauty) that processing them requires a slowing of attention most contemporary prose does not ask for. The book pulled my own prose toward more compression, less explanation, more trust that a specific image will carry its own weight without narrative scaffolding. Some readers hate this book. The ones who love it tend to stop being able to read any other novels for weeks.

**3. Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015, posthumous).** A short-story collection published over a decade after Berlin’s death, drawing on her fifty-year writing life. Berlin worked as a cleaning woman, ER nurse, switchboard operator, high-school teacher; she was married three times, raised four sons, suffered from alcoholism, and wrote in snatched half-hours for most of her adult life. The stories are set in laundromats, trailer parks, hospitals, and San Francisco rooming houses. Her prose is casual and precise in a way that almost no other American writer has achieved. The book ruined me because it demonstrated, conclusively, that you do not need a stable life to produce great fiction; you just need the attention of a great writer applied to the life you actually have.

**4. Lydia Davis, Collected Stories (2009).** Some of Davis’s “stories” are two sentences long. Some are two pages. The collection is almost a thousand pages of compressed observation, translation study, philosophical micro-fiction, and the specific-kind-of-tiny-essay Davis invented. I read her in my mid-twenties at the wrong speed and was bored; I reread her in my early thirties at the right speed and was wrecked. Davis teaches the reader how to read Davis; the speed is patient, the attention is calibrated, and the rewards are cumulative. If you are a writer who has been told to “write less and cut more,” Lydia Davis is where you learn what that actually means.

**5. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956).** Baldwin wrote this novel (a white American expatriate’s doomed love affair with an Italian bartender in 1950s Paris) when his publisher explicitly told him not to, because a Black writer’s second novel should not, in the publisher’s view, feature white characters and a gay love story. He wrote it anyway. It ruined me for almost every twentieth-century American novel I had read up to that point, because the prose is so plainly superior to the plain-style canon (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Carver) that I could not, afterwards, experience those writers the same way. Baldwin’s sentences move with more intelligence, more moral seriousness, and more music than almost any of his American contemporaries, and most of the canon-formation of twentieth-century American fiction has been scrambling to catch up to him for six decades.

6. Elena Ferrante, the Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014). Four novels, about three thousand pages total, covering sixty years of a friendship between two girls (Elena and Lila) from a poor Naples neighborhood. The pseudonymous Ferrante (probably, per recent scholarship, the translator Anita Raja) wrote a series that is at once a bildungsroman, a social novel of Italy in the postwar decades, a meditation on female friendship and female creative ambition, and a formal experiment in how interior a narrative voice can be without breaking. I read all four in six weeks and could not work on my own fiction for the next month because Ferrante had shown me that a domestic-scale story could carry historical weight equal to any “war novel,” and I had to reconsider everything I thought I knew about what subjects mattered. Ferrante’s popularity has quietly made the case that serious writing about women’s lives is economically viable in a market that publishers have spent decades claiming it isn’t. There’s a long-running debate about how her success intersects with what the romantasy boom and the Sarah J. Maas phenomenon have proven, commercially, about women reading women. Ferrante is the literary-tier proof. Maas is the commercial-tier proof. They are not the same genre but they are, in a real sense, part of the same correction.

**7. Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living (2018).** A short memoir (second in her “living autobiography” trilogy), written by Levy in her late fifties after the end of her marriage. The book is about living in a leaky London flat, raising daughters, and rebuilding a writing life at an age the culture had decided she was past. It is, also, genuinely funny. Levy writes with a light touch that most serious literary memoirists lack. I read it in one afternoon on a delayed flight and emerged convinced that I had been overvaluing struggle as a writer’s marker and undervaluing wit and durability. The book ruined me because it showed me how much grief can be metabolized through a specific register of dry observation, and how much that register was missing from my own work at the time.

**8. Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2000).** Not about samurais. A novel about a brilliant single mother raising her brilliant son in rainy London, teaching him ancient Greek and Japanese and the physics of X-rays while they watch Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai together, and the son’s subsequent quest to find his biological father using the samurai’s lessons. The novel is long, structurally experimental, genuinely funny, and the most underrated English-language novel of the twenty-first century. DeWitt’s career has been a long working-out of how to survive as a serious writer under hostile commercial conditions (the novel was rejected dozens of times, published to limited sales, and only slowly reached its audience). Reading The Last Samurai at twenty-six made me understand what I wanted my fiction to do, even though I could not yet do it.

**9. Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God (1995).** I have referenced Carson before in other pieces because she is unavoidable, but this specific collection contains the sequence “The Glass Essay,” which I wrote about previously in a piece on intermittent talent. The whole book (essays, lyric poems, the “Glass Essay” verse narrative, the translation of Sappho fragments) is a sustained demonstration of what a writer can do when she refuses to commit to one form. Carson is a classicist, a poet, an essayist, a translator, and a visual artist, and the layering of those practices in Glass, Irony, and God is the thing I kept going back to when I was trying to figure out whether I could let my own writing be more than one kind of thing at once. The answer the book gave me was yes. I have never fully recovered.

Why the list is this weird

I want to say something about why the list is not the “standard” books-that-changed-me list (no Catcher in the Rye, no The Bell Jar, no 1984, no On the Road, no Infinite Jest, though I’ve read all of those and respect most of them). The “standard” list is the list of books everyone agrees are important, which means those books are also part of most serious readers’ shared cultural background, which means the books do not ruin readers the way they used to. They are absorbed into the general reading-atmosphere of being educated. You cannot be ruined by a book that everyone you know has also read. The ruin requires a certain amount of private collision.

The list above consists of books that hit me at specific moments in my reading life when I was ready for them, and each one produced a period of not-writing afterwards because my prior assumptions about what fiction (or nonfiction, or poetry) could do had been rearranged. That is what I mean by “ruined.” The ruin is the pause. The pause is where new work becomes possible.

If you are a writer reading this and you want to assemble your own ruin-list, the rule is not “find the books everyone is recommending.” The rule is “find the books that nobody you know has read, in the specific corners of writing that your own instincts pull you toward, and read them at a speed that lets them actually work.” The books above are my list. Your list will be different. The practice of building it is what keeps the work honest.

I have had, over the last three years, two further books that might belong on this list once I’ve absorbed them enough to know. Bluets by Maggie Nelson (which I’ve referenced enough that I won’t re-list). The Argonauts, also Nelson. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill. The list is open. The ruin is recurring. The work keeps happening, and the work comes out different each time the list extends by one more book I had to stop writing to properly absorb.

Which is, I think, the whole game. Books that ruin you are the only ones worth recommending.