In Jami Attenberg’s affecting novel “The Middlesteins,” a bright, dark-eyed wife and mother slowly eats herself to death. “ ‘The Middlesteins’ had me from its very first pages,” Jonathan Franzen wrote in the blurb, “but it wasn’t until its final pages that I fully appreciated the range of Attenberg’s sympathy and the artistry of her storytelling.” Says Attenberg, who’s yet to meet “The Corrections” author: “No one was more surprised than I was to get a blurb from him. I don’t know him, but he had a stack of galleys and somehow picked mine, and it’s helped tremendously!” Like the Middlesteins, she grew up in the Chicago suburbs before moving to Brooklyn. “I’ve always had a big personality, and I feel I just fit in!” Here are some of her favorite books.
Just Kids
by Patti Smith
This story about her friendship with [artist] Robert Mapplethorpe is a beautiful time capsule of its period. I always thought her music was really cool, but I wasn’t that familiar with her poetry. I work occasionally in a bookstore called Word, and it’s the book I sell to people the most.
Blue Plate Special
by Kate Christensen
Kate and I met around the time her book “The Great Man” and my book “The Kept Man” came out. Both are about artists from Brooklyn. This is a memoir, out in July, in which she looks back on her relationship with food, her love affairs and her emergence as a writer. Her sentences are so amazing. She’s been through a lot, but it’s a funny, emotionally generous memoir.
Up in the Old Hotel
by Joseph Mitchell
This is a collection of his New Yorker essays from the 1940s to the ’60s. He’s a journalist who’s very novelistic in his writing, and he’s a very good listener. Here, he lets a bunch of quirky New Yorkers — a saloon keeper, a street preacher, a woman who runs a movie theater in the Bowery — tell their stories. That last inspired my next novel.
Heartburn
by Nora Ephron
I didn’t know Nora — I wish I had. I saw the movie first, and I think I’ve read this book three or four times now, and every time it’s different. I love her treatment of food. This book gets me hungry, and that’s a compliment. It’s a slim volume that tells a really big story. And the mashed-potato recipe is really evocative!