Reading Companions
Reading Companions is where I place my fiction in conversation with other writers’ work. Not to review or recommend, per se, but to examine what a book is doing with the same questions I’m asking. How they deal with the topic and structure the story.
This is not a virtual bookshelf of favorites or a reading list, but a conversation of ideas and themes.
How Stories Depict Mental Illness
These are the books recommended as shelf-mates for my novel about a family and mental illness. Few actually were. But reading them together—Poe to Plath to Olive Kitteridge—revealed how literature and mental illness have shaped each other for two centuries
I Know This Much Is True, Mine Is Too
A critique partner suggested a book about a brother trying to save his mentally ill twin as a comp title. I read it afraid my story had already been told.
Outside Looking In: Crazy by Pete Earley
Pete Earley’s Crazy and my novel Hope and Madness cover the same broken ground — mental illness, law enforcement, and the impossible cost of fighting for someone you love. One maps the system from the outside. The other lives inside it. Both are necessary. Neither offers easy answers.
Personal essays on meaning, idendity, and care
Process, practice, and making stories
Exploring ideas, systems, and hard questions