Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
Patricia Lockwood pulls from the well of personal experience in her novels, including in her latest, Will There Ever Be Another You. The story follows a woman grappling with the symptoms of long COVID, and is inspired, Lockwood says, by “a sudden and total departure from reality, and the desire to send postcards home about it.” (Lockwood wrote about her own illness from COVID in “Insane after Coronavirus?” for the London Review of Books.)
“I had an agreement with myself that every perception I put in [Will There Ever Be Another You] would be accurate,” Lockwood says. “Facts and set dressings could change, but the perceptions must be real. So when it was finished I was surprised by how complete and faithful a picture it presented of this strange state.”
Her Thurber Prize for American Humor-winning memoir, Priestdaddy, chronicled moving back in with her mother and Lutheran-minister-turned-Catholic-priest father along with her husband. And Lockwood’s debut novel, No One is Talking About This—which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Women’s Prize for Fiction, and won the Dylan Thomas Prize—focused on a woman consumed by the Internet. (Lockwood has been called the poet laureate of a pre-Elon Musk Twitter.) She has also written two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, and is currently at work on another poetry collection.
The Indiana-born, Georgia-based bestselling author, poet, and essayist goes by “Tricia”; went to six Catholic schools and was in a Christian youth group called God’s Gang; has lived in multiple rectories and an abandoned convent; met Pope Francis; met her husband in a poetry chatroom and married him at 21; has cats named Miette, Fenriz, and Gilly; and writes in bed.
The one reading habit she’ll never change? “Reading first thing in the morning with my coffee. And also reading Hollywood memoirs on planes.”
Good at: procrastination.
Bad at: being watched; switching genres.
Likes: GAP sweatsuits.
Dislikes: low-rise jeans.
Scroll through her book recommendations below.
The book that…:
…I recommend over and over again:
Definitely Maya Angelou’s autobiographical sequence, particularly the first four books, which span not just decades but continents. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas is my sentimental favorite, because I’ll read anything about a company on tour.
…currently sits on my nightstand:
This Year by John Darnielle! It’s a book of his lyrics (365 songs, naturally) with some deeper background on each.
…I’d pass on to a kid:
Tell Me a Mitzi by Lore Segal—recently reissued by New York Review Books. This book contains the greatest illustration (done by Harriet Pincus) of a bowl of chicken soup that the world has ever seen.
…made me laugh out loud:
Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories by Jean Shepherd. Everyone knows In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash for the Christmas Story connection, but this one is indelible to me for the waft of sauerkraut between Wanda’s lips.
…I’d like turned into a TV show:
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, obviously. I want to see those freaks get it on!
…I last bought:
A copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Collected Poems, which contains her sequence about the forgotten flu pandemic.
…has the greatest ending:
Probably has to be Villette by Charlotte Brontë. What happened to that fussy little boy M. Paul??
…has a sex scene that will make you blush:
Bent on Grace by Maryann Brickey. Tell me another book whose romantic interludes involve sea turtles, golf, and unexploded nuclear bombs.
…helped me become a better writer:
Nabokov’s Speak, Memory—not just in the traditional way, but in the very literal sense that when I was finishing Priestdaddy and felt I needed a little more punch here and there, I went through the text and freely lifted his adjectives.
….is a master class on dialogue:
Anything by Henry Green, particularly Party Going and Loving.
….describes a house I’d want to live in or a place I’d want to visit:
Probably I Capture the Castle. I need to kiss that powerful gargoyle.
…I would have blurbed if asked:
I actually was sent Han Kang’s The Vegetarian to blurb, but didn’t get to read it in time!
…I never returned to the library (mea culpa):
It’s an odd one that I’ve never heard of anyone else reading: Margaret of the Imperfections by Lynda Sexson. It’s clearly a forerunner in that ’80s/’90s short-story magical-realism wave. The title story concerns a woman whose body begins producing pearls.
…makes me feel seen:
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira. I probably reread Ghosts more, but something about the saga of a man taken apart by lightning in a strange landscape and left to make his way resonates with me.
…I could only have discovered at The Dusty Bookshelf in Lawrence, Kansas:
Gossamer Axe by Gael Baudino! A fantastic story about lesbian harp-love channeled through an electric guitar…or something.
…that holds a recipe to a favorite dish:
Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me with Apples, which contains her approximation of Danny Kaye’s recipe for lemon pasta, which she said was transcendent. Something about the way she describes it nearly melting on the tongue, and having to eat it in the kitchen while it was still hot.
