My earliest reading memory
The earliest book I remember reading and loving was Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. A boy imagines himself into an adventure, gets into trouble, imagines a way home. It bears rereading still: it’s the very best parable of the creative life I know.
My favourite book growing up
I read voraciously and indiscriminately as a kid, so much so that I’m not sure I really had favourites. I loved the Judy Blume books I stole from my older siblings’ bookshelves and the darker novels of Cynthia Voigt. Two series by the fantasy writer Mercedes Lackey left a mark: Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise, Magic’s Price, maybe the first books I read that featured a gay protagonist; and the Diana Tregarde mysteries, a noir series featuring a hardboiled witch. Catnip for 13-year-old me.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Not a book, but a composer. I didn’t become serious about literature until my late teens, and it happened largely through studying classical singing: art songs were my introduction to poetry. The music of Benjamin Britten, especially, was my literary education. His Turn of the Screw introduced me to Henry James; Death in Venice was my first exposure to Thomas Mann: two writers crucial to the kind of novelist I would become. But it was Britten’s setting of English-language poetry — Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Hardy’s Winter Words, the Romantics — that sensitised me to the ways language can be made dense with meaning beyond any paraphrasable “message”. Many art song composers choose middling texts, but Britten was stimulated by the challenge of setting the greatest poems in the language. (Also in other languages: Les illuminations introduced me to Rimbaud.) He entered into those texts with preternatural sympathy; his songs are great acts of literary interpretation. To my mind, he is one of the 20th century’s most brilliant readers.
The writer who changed my mind
I was a kid with a devotional temperament, but growing up gay in the American south soured me on religion. Then, in my early 20s, I read Saint Augustine’s Confessions. It’s odd, maybe, that Augustine, architect or defender of some of the Christian tradition’s most toxic traits, such as original sin, made that tradition available to me again; not its beliefs, but its intellectual resources. To read Confessions is to be immersed in thinking, not as doctrinaire assertion, but as bewilderment and quest. Augustine is my favourite writer; he is also the source for those ancient and persistent literary modes sometimes grouped under the sloppy, misleading, very nearly useless term “autofiction”.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I wrote poetry for 20 years before trying my hand at fiction. But I had always devoured novels, and I remember feeling that if I never tried to write one I would regret it. When I read WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in graduate school I felt a door open. It would be a decade before I started work on my first novel, but Sebald pointed me towards a kind of fiction in which excitement is generated not by invention but investigation.
The author I came back to
I think we often resist great literature: we have to learn how to read it, we have to tune ourselves to its frequency. I remember idly pulling a volume of poems by Frank Bidart off a shelf when I was 20 or so and quickly closing it again. A few years later, reading his collection Desire would be one of the key literary experiences of my life. He remains, for me, the most important living US writer.
The book I reread
I first read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room when I was 13 or 14 (an experience I wrote about for the Guardian). I read it again, at least twice, in college, and once more in my 20s. Then many years passed; the next time I encountered it was after I published my first novel, when I was often asked to speak about it. Since then I’ve been reading and teaching it almost obsessively, and I’ve just finished a long essay on why I can’t let go of it. I’ve been trying to understand how a book that is so unremittingly negative – in which everyone ends up dead or devastated – could be such a source of affirmation for me as an adolescent. (The argument I made in my Guardian essay – that the character of Giovanni saves the book from the homophobic logic that the narrative world seems to confirm – seems wrong to me now; the essay I’ve just finished largely recants it.)
The book I could never read again
As a young person I loved the poetry of Adrienne Rich. When I read her Collected Poems a few years ago, I felt almost completely locked out of it. The poems felt like the opposite of that Augustinian thinking I described – not questing but fixed, not bewildered but sure. Something has changed in me, closed me off to the poems. But I don’t want to say I’ll never read them again – I will. I hope I can find my way back to them.
The book I discovered later in life
I was a late adopter of George Eliot. I didn’t read Middlemarch until my late 30s. Why didn’t someone intervene? She’s one of my favourite novelists now, for her sweep and drama, for her ferocious intelligence. My recommendation to other belated adopters for a first encounter is the audiobook of Middlemarch, read by Juliet Stevenson, who is absolutely brilliant. Thirty-six hours of bliss.
The book I am currently reading
In preparation for a seminar I’m teaching this fall, I’m rereading Michael Gorra’s extraordinary Portrait of a Novel, a kind of biography of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. In tracing James’s process of composition, Gorra shows a young writer coming into his strength, writing his first masterpiece. It’s an exhilarating book.
My comfort read
There are many discomforting things in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. But Woolf loves her characters and their world, and everything in the book, from its descriptions of light to the shapes of its sentences, embodies that love. Reading anything by Woolf – To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway are my favourite of the novels, but also her luminous essays and diaries – is a reminder of the possibilities of literature, of how brilliant a technology it can be capturing the texture of existence.