The best books to embrace your main character energy

In the year after my father’s death in a car crash, I was a young person in New York, trying to break into the world of magazine journalism.

I had been given half of an insurance settlement after my dad’s crash, which I used to survive while I applied for jobs every day. I was too zoned out to work at the time. But one thing I did do a lot of was read. I started with a book recommended by Sharon Stone on Oprah. The Alchemist.

What I loved the most about Santiago’s journey was the unexpected lessons that reveal his true path, the omens he finds along the way, and the belief he develops that when you go after your heart’s desire, the universe supports you.

All of these ideas would end up in my book, 20 years later, and this is because The Alchemist saved my life. It renewed my sense of purpose and belief that the world was not a cruel place—that my father’s tragic death was just part of my path.

Before I was an author, I was primarily a national magazine copy editor, a job I finally scored after eight years of climbing up the magazine journalism ladder.

I wrote once in a while, but this mostly meant TV recaps by the time I was entrenched in magazines. But one day, an article about a safe-driving activist crossed my desk, and soon I was speaking with him in high schools.

Around the time I checked off “swim the width of a river” from my father’s bucket list, I also read Huckleberry Finn, as the setting seemed only right. I wrote a tribute to it in the second chapter of my book. My dad’s favorite author was Twain, but what I appreciated about him was that he wrote the novel as veiled propaganda. It’s a book that professes Twain’s anti-racism perspective. He just put his cause into a novel.

I realized I could do the same thing with safe driving. My book often mentions safe-driving advocates, and it also often retells stories about marginalized Americans in our history. I did not do this by accident.

A weird part of writing memoir is needing to view yourself as a character. But it’s a necessary task, as all the best memoirs are written like a novel.

Because my “main character” was a writer who struggled to see herself as a writer, and often felt self-conscious about finishing the bucket list of a man, I had to learn about how female writers had historically been depicted.

One insight in Huf’s book was that kunstlerromans (or the coming-of-age of an artist novel) about male writers often depict him as effeminate, while kunstlerromans about female writers depict her as tomboy-ish. 

Through his art, the man is in touch with his feminine side and thus healthier. Through her art, the woman is pursuing a “masculine” life by daring to have a voice, but this makes her an abomination (which might explain why I love Frankenstein).

This book examines six depictions of the female creative protagonist—including books like The Bell Jar and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

This book was an integral resource when I began to write my book. It helped me shape the structure of my book.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”

This, and other books I've read, did this. My favorite books of all time have inventive structures. And reading these helped me find mine.

I read this during a confusing time—when I was seeking treatment for depression, from age 16 through 24.

Here was the third-most adapted book in history, and yet with each adaptation, the story grew further from the author’s true voice, which was that of an 18-year-old girl. How odd that this could happen, given that Frankenstein revolves around the creature finding his identity.

He only wants to do good, but when he learns how to read, he also learns how to label himself—as separate from God, and separate from man. He believes he must be bad because he’s different. The whole town agrees. 

When I read this, I also felt different. This feeling didn’t go away until I finished my dad’s bucket list and saw the beauty and wonder he’d seen in me. I was different. But this was a good thing. I pray Mary Shelley found the same peace, after all that she gave to us.

She asked the question: Was a creation of the mind just as valuable as birthing with the body? Is a woman less than if she chooses the former? Thanks to her, I got to feel more than when I finished my book. When I let my creation be.