Books like Romantic Outlaws — picked by fans

First, because it’s incredibly funny. Geoff Dyer set out—he says—to write a sober, serious study of D. H. Lawrence, but life, travel arrangements, random people and his own inertia kept getting in the way. The story of his odyssey doesn’t just evoke all the things about writing that we’ve always suspected (that it’s hard; that it’s easy; that we often wonder why on earth we do it; that we never question that we want to do it). It also, by stealth, evokes and explains an amazing amount about Lawrence, and why he’s a writer that so many people love—or hate—so passionately. 

We often feel alone when we experience change and transitions, but Saunders’s book reminds me that we’re all on the journey of life together.

President Lincoln can’t let go of his young son, Willie, when the boy dies of typhoid fever. Willie, too, is holding on: lingering in the after-death world, he’s convinced his parents are going to come get him. He’s surrounded by people who are also in bardo (the state between death and rebirth), trapped in denial and attachment. When they accept the reality of their situation, the characters are liberated from their suffering.

This book has deepened my understanding of how—both individually and collectively—we struggle against loss, but it’s possible to let go and move forward. 

Miep Gies was one of the people who hid Anne Frank, her family, and four friends in the Secret Annex in Amsterdam in 1942.

At great risk, four of Otto Frank’s employees secured food stamps from the underground and took care of the hiders for an astonishing two years and one month before they were betrayed. Gies’s book gives a real sense of what it was like to live under enemy occupation when it was impossible to trust anyone.

“We were no longer keeping silent. We had lost the habit of speech. Do you understand the difference?” she once said. She didn’t consider herself heroic for helping the Franks. “It was simple. You were asked. You said yes.”

Just as I turned to Trevor Noah’s memoir for answers about apartheid while in South Africa, I devoured this book while in China to more deeply understand how the country was shaped by Communism.

The author’s personal history is frightening and raw—at times hard to read—but it is important to understand a few layers deeper than what the news can offer or, in my case, what tourists get served on visits to China. It’s a wrenching story that has stayed with me for years. 

No memoir has changed the way I think about identity quite like Educated.

I went into it expecting a story about education. What stayed with me was something much deeper—the emotional cost of questioning the beliefs, people, and world that shaped your entire life.

What I admired most about Tara Westover's story was that she didn't make things simple. There were no easy heroes or villains. Just people, complicated relationships, and the uncomfortable reality that sometimes growth means questioning everything you once accepted as truth.

I kept thinking about how difficult it can be to become yourself when doing so means letting go of parts of the person you were taught to be.

I loved this book because it was as much about the author's inner journey as it was the outer one. I loved both aspects of this book.

I love books that give you almost a window into the soul of the writer. Robyn shares her thoughts and experience so well as she makes her way solo 2,000 miles in the Australian Outback. I loved her bravery. This was an epic trip. As one of the first adventure books I had read, it got me hooked. This was a book that made an impact. 

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s most famous work (and it is phenomenal), but this one captured my heart. While the former focuses on her father, here Bechdel turns her focus on her relationship with her mother, weaving in a lot of psychoanalysis and modernist literature.

Bechdel’s characteristic intricacy and attention to detail are on full display, and the frequent inclusion of dreams and their interpretation (a particular interest of mine) make the whole book feel almost surreal yet completely grounded.

This book, justly honored with the Pulitzer Prize, surprised me with its formal range and intensity of experience.

Trethewey is celebrated as a chronicler of our collective history, but I was far more taken with the poems of personal history—and, more specifically, personal loss. The poems that examine the absence left by her mother’s untimely death are, to me, the defining poems of the book. These often exemplify her gift for presenting the most telling detail or selecting the word that will resonate on the broadest level.

Let me hone in on one poem, “Myth,” a recasting of the Orpheus story. What astonished me about this poem was the formal structure. It consists of two sections of nine lines, each arranged in terza rima stanzas. The second section rewrites the first half—in reverse! The effect is to convey the experience of descending into the darkness of the underworld and then… show more.

I’m often asked by Americans who aren’t familiar with Wollstonecraft (or confuse mother and daughter), which of her books to read first. Vindication of the Rights of Woman is her most famous, but I always answer that if you only read one, this book is it. It’s her most modern and personal work, and the last thing she wrote before dying of puerperal fever at age 38, after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley. It’s part travelogue, love letter, philosophical treatise, cultural history, and (I would argue) suicide note, bookended by her two attempts after a shattering affair with American speculator Gilbert Imlay. It’s short and accessible, beautifully written, and a glimpse into a magnificent mind.

This book became a kind of hymnal for me during the writing of Love and Fury. It was Virginia Woolf who in 1929 resurrected Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation and legacy, buried for a century because a tell-all memoir written by her widower, William Godwin, scandalized the world. It seemed natural to turn to Woolf, who found inspiration in Wollstonecraft’s “experiments in living”. I read a section of the diary every day before I started to write. Woolf’s profound creative visions, her anguish, and passions, her voice, helped me locate Wollstonecraft and my own voice in hers.