Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
I had read American Pastoral three times and I was filled with so much respect and fear towards the book that it frightened me when it came to my own writing. Then one day it hit me that it wasn't the first thing he'd written, so I picked up Goodbye, Columbus. It's amazing to think of Roth, published at 26, and to see how much he grew by the time he wrote American Pastoral. The fact that you could have people just be extremely excited was a really calming, influential thing for me. It made me want to write.
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
I connected so much with that character as a young girl. As I got older, I realized that the settings of books that I love most are always the spiritual description. I still come back to this book all the time because of the vulnerability (脆弱性) in there. Every time I write now I think about that feeling that you get from some books, that you've really been let into the most frightened and quiet corners of someone's soul.
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
I remember reading The Silence of the Lambs. There's nothing more terrifying than someone who is intelligent and dangerous. He even had that longing to eat humans, which was terrible, but the magic was that he'd then say these really insightful things. I wouldn't have written anything if I hadn't read the line, "We strongly want to have what we see every day," in my head. I loved the frightening insights into the possibilities of what's existing unseen around you.
