Today, write about a book that heavily influenced you, including why it was influential, where and when you read the book, what was going on in your life at the time you read it, and what was different in your life after you read it.
For me, this is the 1990 book “Skinny Legs and All” by Tom Robbins, which I read maybe a year or two after it came out, after my cousin gave me her copy. Prior to reading it, I had been subconsciously doing the writing equivalent of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and suddenly I was like, oh wait, I can write like the weirdo I am. I mean, if you don’t know this book, a subplot of it involves the rich inner lives of inanimate objects. But, it had literally never occurred to me that I could show up as my weird self on the page before or that my weird ideas were acceptable, which is ridiculous in retrospect, but that’s the danger of only having been exposed to a certain pantheon of writers and having “great works” of literature positioned as the end-all-be-all— it has us believing we all have to write like dead English white dudes in order to be any good. Phooey, I say.
Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would probably agree, based on her message in one of my favorite TED Talks: the danger of a single story.