The best memoirs, essays, and fiction that inspired me to write

I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in college and it blew my mind. I’d never read anything like this outrageous tale of a journalist in search of the American Dream. The plot: Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone send Thompson to Las Vegas to cover, respectively, a motorcycle race and a district attorneys convention. Thompson, high on hallucinogenic drugs and ether, and with his attorney in tow, takes the notion of “new journalism” into a hilarious new dimension. Thompson was the kind of journalist I wanted to be: a truth-teller who made his own rules. I’ve since read the book about 25 times and it’s made me laugh every time.

I read Tropic of Cancer at the beginning of my writing career, soon after I’d begun living on my own for the first time. Miller’s life as a Brooklyn boy in Paris, struggling to survive and to write, seemed similar in so many ways to my own life in Manhattan. I’ve since read Tropic of Cancer multiple times and have portions memorized. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Henry Miller—that’s how taken I was by his voice. Miller taught me that it’s possible to write a great book that’s voice-driven rather than plot-driven.

Portnoy’s Complaint came out when I was 16. I heard my aunt telling my parents about it. She’d gotten Portnoy from a book-of-the-month club and said it was “disgusting” and wanted to get it out of her house. I didn’t understand how a book titled “Port Noise Complaint” could be disgusting. What were people complaining about? Squawking seagulls? Foghorns? She gave the book to my parents, and a few days later I was sitting at my desk, doing homework, when I noticed it on the shelf: Oh, it’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I started reading it. When I got to chapter 2, “Whacking Off,” I understood what my aunt was upset about. Portnoy is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a master class in how to write a personal essay. Every essay Didion writes in any of her books is beautifully rendered—she doesn’t waste a word—as well as emotionally engaging and well reported and researched. Whatever she’s writing about—politics, California, rock musicians—you are there with her, on the scene. The book’s preface explains how and why Didion did what she did and contains this nugget of truth: Writers are always selling somebody out. And the title essay is simply the best piece of writing I’ve ever read about Haight-Ashbury and the 1960s.

Catch-22 is a laugh-out-loud funny and grotesquely horrific antiwar satire that exposes the absurdity of the military bureaucracy and of war. It focuses on Yossarian, a WWII bombardier who doesn’t want to fly any more missions. The book is so complex and detailed you’ll find something new in it with each reading. The title, meaning a dilemma with no solution, has found its way into the English language—you can look it up in Webster’s. The catch-22 in Catch-22 is this: If you wanted to get out of combat duty you had to be crazy. But anybody who wanted to get out of combat duty wasn’t really crazy. Many years ago, when I was writing about the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, I often turned to Catch-22 for inspiration.