This American Ex-Wife syllabus

And other links for your Sunday

For the first time since Christmas, I finally had a moment to just sit on my porch and drink coffee and read books.

In college, my advisor asked me what I pictured myself doing as a job. And I said, “Reading.” And he suggested becoming an academic. Years later, when I was working a bunch of freelance jobs and frantically applying and getting rejected from PhD programs, my friend Anna, herself in a grad program said, “You get paid to read. I have to pay to read!”

After many years of rejection and feeling lost, I eventually got an MFA in creative writing, which I joke is negative a degree — it cancels out my bachelor’s so I am basically at a high school equivalency.

And I make that joke because my MFA was essentially just reading novels and shouting about them at a Cambridge bar. I suppose I wrote a lot too. But none of it was good. My MFA advisor one semester, Wayne Brown, looked at me and said my writing wasn’t coming together because I was too afraid to tell the truth.

It took me years to learn how not to be afraid. But I think I no longer am.

All of that is a pretty sideways intro into a little book list I wanted to make of all the books I read while writing my own book. Books I didn’t necessarily quote or weave into the story, but books that feel part of the same narrative — women breaking, women forging new paths, people finding delight and pleasure outside of the prescribed norms.