RECOMMENDED READING

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

by Joan Didion

“Joan Didion elevates noticing to a high art – she is the master of choosing telling details that illuminate an entire dynamic, of noticing gardenias in the pool and the rattlesnakes in the garden. She writes about subjects both poppy and political, personal and cultural. That was something I thought a lot about while writing The Girls – how to write a book that dealt with larger cultural forces and mythologies but doing so through a deeply personal lens.”

Endless Love

by Scott Spencer “So much of the narrative around first loves is predicated on eventually getting over that person, moving on. The narrator of this novel flatly refuses to get over his first love, and sublimates his entire being into resurrecting this teen romance. I love this book for its wholehearted embrace of extremes, the sense of adolescence almost as a time of psychosis. It’s a book about taking emotions seriously in a world that doesn’t allow for it.”

I’m With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie

by Pamela Des Barres “Des Barres published the diaries she kept as a teenage groupie in the ’60s. There’s joy and agency in her stories of sex and fanhood, even though the situations are dark and manipulative. Instead of being a pitiful character, she emerges as an artist in her own right. It’s a book about the power of teenage girls, their immense capacity for emotion and desire. She’s never a victim – rare in a book about girls and sexuality. By the end, she’s more interesting than the stars you’re supposed to admire.”

Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov “This book creates its own internal vocabulary, where every detail has a fetishistic quality. It’s a closed system, everything in service of building this highly specific, lush world. I love Nabokov’s elevated aesthetic vision, his funhouse version of America, and a narrator so obsessive and single-minded makes the book into this almost-claustrophobic but always elegant fever-dream.”