Author Bookshelf
by Sarah Rose Etter, July 11, 2023 9:36 AM
When you’re drafting a novel, you must be very careful. Whatever you read can cause an existential crisis. All of your ideas and confidence can get thrown into a pit as you spiral over the idea that you should have written a book just like the one you are reading, not the one you are writing. So before I write a novel, I pull together a small stack of the books I want to be in conversation with and read those over and over again. By the time I’m in the later stages of editing, I can usually weave in some new books to help me at the line-level. Here are a few of the books that helped me draft Ripe.
by Joan Didion
It’s a classic; it’s iconic; it’s a woman up against the giant landscape of money and America and abortion. The pristine sentences always give me something to aim for. It doesn’t matter what anyone says: Didion is the best.
by Sylvia Plath
I re-read the opening pages of this and Play It As It Lays dozens of times as I found the rhythm for mine. The Bell Jar has a preoccupation with the tragedies unfolding in the news, a way of portraying someone who isn’t used to wealth being surrounded by it, that gave me a lot of support to enter that territory with my protagonist Cassie. I don’t usually set my work in a specific place or time, but The Bell Jar managed to do that and somehow remain timeless, giving me a model for setting Ripe in pre-pandemic San Francisco.
by Aglaja Veteranyi (tr. Vincent King)
I could talk about this book forever. Translated by Vincent Kling, it tells the story of a little girl whose family are Romanian circus performers traveling through Europe. The voice and structure always give me permission to mess around a little bit more when I’m drafting — in this book, the narration will suddenly be stripped down to a single sentence in all caps on one page. Its fragmented nature makes it one of my favorites. I buy this one for people all the time.
by Jade Sharma
This novel grabbed me by the throat and never let go. I wish more people were reading it. The pace, the sentences, the portrayal of mental illness and addiction — it works on so many levels. The first time I read it, I remember wanting to write a book as propulsive as Problems. Sharma’s style gave me freedom to try portraying the pace of San Francisco and drugs in new ways — my take on that ended up being the colons followed by rapid-fire descriptions.
by Shirley Jackson
This might be my favorite Shirley Jackson book, although it’s hard to pick one. I had it on my stack not only for the loner nature of Natalie, but also for the pitch-perfect ending. The way it unravels is exactly what I hoped to do with Ripe. I found myself re-reading the final pages over and over again when I was working on the closing scenes in my novel.
by Morgan Parker
The boldness at the line level in Parker’s poetry always dazzles me. Whenever I read these poems, I feel pushed to be more honest in my work. These poems are so woven through with the body, with capitalism, with fury, that they served as a constant reminder that it was OK to look unflinchingly at the worst parts of the world and still weave in some beauty.
by Janna Levin
I read a lot about black holes while I was working on Ripe — including Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and tons of research papers — but this is probably the most accessible and fun work of the bunch. Janna Levin is incredible at taking the phenomena of black holes and making them more concrete and understandable.
by Deborah Levy
Editing Ripe took years, and in the final stretch, I read Hot Milk for the first time. It did something to my brain. The sentences are so incredible that I started writing new lines for Ripe, most of which became the final lines for scenes throughout the book, the sort of gut-punch sentences. Reading Levy at that time helped me understand what I was trying to say and how to say it better.
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Sarah Rose Etter is the author of the chapbook Tongue Party and The Book of X, winner of a Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her work has appeared in Time, Guernica, BOMB, the Bennington Review, The Cut, VICE, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan in Iceland. She earned her BA in English from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA in fiction from Rosemont College. She lives in Los Angeles. For more info, visit SarahRoseEtter.com. Ripe is her newest novel.
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