JENNIE EDGAR
For Jennie Edgar, our founder, books are sites of speculation, pretense, becoming—she collects books guided by a vision of the person she strives to be. Smart and informed, to be sure. But also, one whose sensibilities are attuned to the magical ordinariness of daily life. In her Library Card, Jennie shares the books that have been integral to her becoming, as well as those she reads again and again to absorb wisdom, as if by osmosis.
An Imaginary Life by David Malouf was recommended to me by a dear friend in 2012, around a time when I began to read more seriously. In this story of Ovid’s exile from the Roman Empire, we experience how he lives his life estranged from his own culture, and his intimate contact with wildness as amelioration. Malouf’s descriptions of the natural world are some of the most evocative I’ve encountered. It was the first time I recognized—and profoundly felt—mystical elements in secular writing.
I read The Body Artist by Don DeLillo on a train from New York back to Cambridge. I had bought it at The Strand, along with a few other titles. I couldn’t afford books at the time, but bought them nonetheless, as I always did in my twenties. On the train I was transfixed by the book’s simplicity, beauty, and the precision of words. The way these unadorned elements build a complex atmosphere. When reading my favorite line from the novella, “The word for moonlight is moonlight,” some readers might assume it to be plain, even banal. But within the context of the story, within the rhythm of its prose as the characters gaze up at the night sky, within the specificity of DeLillo’s world as it can be penned only by his own mastery, you can feel the weight, the sublimity, of that sentence. I shared it with the man I was seeing at the time. It was his second attempt at picking the book up; the first time he was disinterested. But he fell in love with it, too. Then he found the audiobook narrated by Laurie Anderson. Once you read the book, I absolutely recommend listening. It’s pure gold, a new experience entirely.
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill is just so good. Gaitskill is influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, and I love stumbling upon her rococo flourishes that are surely inspired by the Russian writer. But that’s not primarily why I enjoy Bad Behavior. I love it because it offers a female perspective on subjects that have always felt off-limits. Gaitskill plays with power, subjugation, sexuality, and moral depravity in shockingly conventional settings. Sometimes, when experiencing her work, I’ll need to blink twice and read a sentence again. Gaitskill pulls off a collection that’s badass, feminist, and more than a tad pleasurable.
I hate to say it, but it’s true: I read Henry Miller’s Henry and June when my relationship with my first fiancé was ending, and I credit the book with providing the curiosity and confidence to discover that I was not ready to marry or close myself off from the life I needed to experience. This novel is hot, risqué, and Henry Miller at his best. I discovered him by way of Anaïs Nin, whose journal I picked up on a whim at a used bookstore around the age of seventeen. That’s likely when I began the slow transition from girlhood to womanhood: the summer I spent reading about Louveciennes, art, and love in 1931.
One of the bests for last: Amy Hempel’s stories changed my life and are the reason I write fiction. Her work overturned my understanding of what a story can do, what a story can be, and showed me that moments are just as integral to a story as happenings. The story “In a Tub,” the first in the collection Reasons to Live, will always be my favorite, though others in the book are guaranteed to bring me to tears. Another story not included, “Sing to It,” remains one of the most beautiful “stories” I’ve read. One could call it a prose poem, and that is very much Hempel’s sensibility. I keep her close.
Honorary Mention: One book I love that didn’t make the list is Just Kids by Patti Smith. As a senior in college, I took a dance class cross-registered with the Religious Studies department called Religious Expressions of Everyday Life. One of the professors was David Dorfman, and he was working on a performance that included Patti Smith’s songs. I listened to her album, Horses, in my dorm room and it was completely lost on me. But Just Kids was assigned reading, and I devoured it in one weekend. I was fascinated by her path to becoming an artist, finding love, building community, and developing methodologies for self-expression. With context, I fell in love with Horses and listened to it nonstop. It’s incantatory. It’s pure magic. The experience taught me to pursue what might feel impenetrable. Often, all that’s needed is a reference point.