Books to Bury Me With: Jillian Luft

The book I’d want to take with me to the grave:

Larry Brown’s Tiny Love.

The first book that hit me like a ton of bricks:

Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn.

The book that’s seen more of my tears, coffee stains, and cigarette burns:

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

The book that shook my world like a goddamn hurricane:

Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior/Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick/Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.

The book I wish I’d discovered when my liver was still intact:

Liver is still intact, probably due to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and all the rock memoirs I’ve read, particularly Duff McKagan’s It’s So Easy: And Other Lies.

The book I’d shove into everyone’s hands if I were king of the world:

Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge.

The book that nearly drove me to madness:

Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black because Mueller makes madness seem natural and transcendent.

The book I can’t keep my hands off of, no matter how many times I’ve read it:

Kier-La Janisse’s House of Psychotic Women.

The book I’d hide in the back of my closet, pretending I’m too highbrow for it:

Would never do this but David Lee Roth’s Crazy from the Heat is a masterwork.

The book that left a scar I wish I could forget:

Harry Crew’s A Childhood: The Biography of a Place/Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere.

The author who made me think, "Now that’s a soul in torment":

The first one? Emily Brontë.

The book I’d get a tattoo of if I had the nerve:

When I was 20, I wanted to paint my back with a quote from the translation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther: “The things I know, every man can know, but oh, my heart is mine alone.” Now, I’d probably select something pithy and snarky from Fran Leibowitz.

The book that made me question everything I thought I knew:

Kathy Acker’s Blood & Guts in High School/Pamela Des Barres’ I’m With the Band/Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye/Schopenhauer/Kierkegaard/Lao Tzu.

The book that’s so damn good I’d never loan it out:

Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet or Tatyana Tolstaya’s White Walls because I did that once and never got it back.

The book that’s been my companion through the darkest nights:

Anais Nin’s Cities of the Interior/Sam Heap’s Proximity/Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today.

The book I’d throw in someone’s face during a heated argument:

Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s to de-escalate.

The book that reminds me of a lost love or regret:

André Gide’s Strait Is the Gait/Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost.

The book I wish I could have written, but know I never could:

Going to try to limit this to five - Charlene Elsby’s Red Flags/Kate Zambreno’s Drifts/Elle Nash’s Deliver Me/Lynda Barry’s Cruddy/Sarah Gerard’s Sunshine State.

The book that makes me want to drink myself into oblivion:

The Portable Dorothy Parker/Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company/Anything by Émile Zola because he reminds me that humanity is beautifully doomed.

The book that’s been my refuge from the world’s cruelty:

Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women.