"Mentors, Muses, and Monsters"

I just finished reading Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Benedict (Free Press, 2009). What a wonderful, compelling collection of essays this is! It is a great discovery for those of us who not only love books, but also are hungry for behind-the-scenes information about writers, their lives, and their feelings. Some of the contributors are well-known (e.g., Mary Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Safran Foer), some less so. All rise to the editor's challenge and describe people, experiences, places, and books that influenced them and their writing.

To give you a taste: Alexander Chee writes gratefully about Annie Dillard; Julia Glass praises her editor, Deborah Garrison; Sigrid Nunez writes of her ambivalent feelings about her once-mother-in-law, Susan Sontag; Elizabeth Benedict writes with similar ambivalence about Elizabeth Hardwick; Joyce Carol Oates writes about the early formative influence of the book Alice in Wonderland; Cheryl Strayed tells of her intense connection (from afar) to Alice Munro and her short stories; Edmund White presents a devastating portrait of the wasted talent and difficult personality of Harold Brodkey; and Michael Cunningham writes of the lifelong influence of Virginia Woolf on his work. One common theme is the authors' (mostly positive but sometimes very negative) experiences in MFA Programs. And throughout, the strongest influence on all the writers is the intense, mysterious, sustaining power of the books they themselves read as children and as adults. The message is obvious but bears repeating: one cannot be a good writer without being a voracious reader.