The Writer's Library - Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager

The Writer’s Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives is a collection of author interviews compiled by Nancy Pearl, “America’s favorite librarian,” and Jeff Schwager, a noted critic of books, movies, and theater. What makes the interviews such compelling and entertaining reading for avid readers is that each of them focuses on the influence that particular books have had on the various writers throughout their entire lives, but especially during their formative years.

The twenty-three authors, all but one of whom was interviewed in person, are:

Jonathan Lethem Laila Lalami

Louis Alberto Urrea          Jennifer Egan

T.C. Boyle Susan Choi

Andrew Sean Greer Madeline Miller

Michael Chabon                 Maaza Mengiste

Amor Towles Louise Erdrich

Dave Eggers Laurie Frankel

Viet Thanh Nguyen Jane Hirshfield

Richard Ford Siri Hustvedt

Charlie Johnson Vendela Vida

Donna Tartt Russell Banks

                Ayelet Waldman

(Just in case you are curious, the Donna Tartt interview was conducted via email.)

I was fortunate that several of my favorite authors are included on the list, but as it turned out, I enjoyed the thoughts of those authors with whom I was previously unfamiliar as much as I did those of my old favorites. In their shared introduction to the book, Nancy and Jeff address the book’s title and their interview style/intent this way:

“Thus the title, The Writer’s Library. Not necessarily the writers’ physical libraries, but the libraries they carry around in their hearts and minds; the books that have shaped their tastes, their psyches, the subject matter that fascinates them, the craftsmanship that fills them with envy, the stories that have resonated so deeply that they feel like stories they themselves have lived. For in telling us about the books that informed their lives, they would tell us the stories of their lives.”

And, in almost every instance, their plan worked brilliantly. The interviews are all very conversational in style with the exception of the emailed one with Donna Tartt. That interview reads more like a monologue than an interview, and as such, it suffers in comparison to the other twenty-two in the book. 

Among my favorite quotes from The Writer’s Library are these:

“Someone once said that history gives you the facts, and fiction gives you the truth of the facts.” - Nancy Pearl, interviewing T.C. Boyle

“Life is too short for bad books.” - Michael Chabon 

“The mark of a great novel is that it is engaging as a story, it feels organic in it composition, and yet the way in which all the various components interact creates an infinite number of harmonic combinations in the service of meaning. That’s why different readers of great works can discover different ideas, form different emotions, draw different conclusions, and support the validity of their impressions by pointing to various elements of the text. The best books don’t mean one thing.” - Amor Towles

“…short stories are something that to me are perfect because they have sort of the grace and insight of a poem and the narrative of a novel but, you know, much shorter, so you can have your fix in twenty or thirty minutes with a great short story.” - Viet Thanh Nguyen

“There’s not much crossover, you know. When I give readings, I don’t see any black faces out there, and I think to myself, Couldn’t I just have a couple of black readers, please? Because I, you know, I read black writers - I read everybody. I write black characters. I think that the nature of identity politics has bled into literary outcomes. The whole worth of literature is that it’s trying to show us we’re less distinct from each other than we thought we were.” - Richard Ford

“Reading fiction can move us into new places and provide new perspectives on the world. It can create an expansion of consciousness and serve as an intimate form of knowledge. This has been forgotten in our culture because the imaginary is regarded as soft, feminine, and unserious.”  - Siri Hustvedt

“It is what you read that matters and that you read not to shore up your own smug beliefs but to press yourself beyond them. Books become us. They are literally embedded in our nervous systems in memories. Those memories shift over time, but they form us nevertheless.” - Siri Hustvedt

“…I think that in addition to everything that fiction does to entertain and enlighten us, it needs to make us better people, give us insights into, or at least empathy for, other people.” - Nancy Pearl during her Charles Johnson interview

So there you, have it, a taste of what I most enjoyed in the twenty-three interviews. I found the book largely to be inspiring and comforting in the sense that, perhaps, my lifetime of reading has done some actual good and has made me a better person that I would be if I had not been a reader all my life.

Bottom Line: Reader, beware! Your TBR list is going to grow exponentially if you read The Writer’s Library. By my count, and considering the possibility of a duplication or two, I added some 88 individual books and/or authors to my own. 

Jeff Schwager

Nancy Pearl