My Reading Life: Just Want You Here author Meredith Turits likes to deal with the quiet discomfort

Meredith Turits was a founding editor of Bustle and has written for Vanity Fair, ELLE, BBC.com, Electric Literature, and the Paris Review Daily. She’s turned her attention to fiction with her debut novel Just Want You Here, which follows Ari after the sudden ending of a decade-long relationship. What follows is a romp of a coming-of-age novel filled with mess, stress, and lust.

We asked the author to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers could get to know the books that shaped her throughout her life.

What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?

I always feel like the odd writer out when I talk about my reading life. I was such a punk rock and emo kid obsessed with music that I was not really a reader growing up. I still often feel embarrassed about not being as widely read and having such a breadth of traditional and canonical literary knowledge that so many people do, especially writers. But I’ve found my own way in by connecting with the books I did when I did, even if it took me until college to really understand the true pleasure of reading.

That said, the first books I really loved as a child were in the American Girl series—the original ones with the five historical girls. I had two of the dolls, and I adored the stories that went along with them. Looking back, I also loved that each series had the same theme for each of the six books for each girl, and I loved the symmetry. It’s funny to think about, because I’m so obsessed with the structure of storytelling that it clearly lit up a part of my brain that connects to writing now.

What book helped you through puberty?

I’m non-traditional in the sense that I never did the Judy Blume circuit or read the Harry Potter series, which came out when I was 10. (I remember my best friend queuing until midnight for the releases each year.) 

The stories that got me through those formative years were often about being an outsider or dealing with quiet discomfort: books including The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (I never saw the film, I was so afraid of it ruining the book), Go Ask Alice, and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. I had a pretty hard time emotionally growing up and isolated myself a lot, and it felt good to be seen in that way. And later on, Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and EMO, was like a dog-eared bible to me.

What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?

This one’s pretty left field, especially because I’m not really a biography reader, but the book that blew me open in high school was a biography of the editor Max Perkins. He edited F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, etc, and the book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, is about how he worked with these luminaries, but also about who he was. 

Maybe my bias is showing because I’m a journalist and editor by trade, but I loved the look at how writing came together and what it meant to be a person behind the scenes, which is where I’m actually most comfortable. It’s quite odd that we read this book as part of an AP English curriculum, but I’m lucky it crossed my desk.

If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?

If I went straight down the middle, the first picks would be Lolita and Rebecca, which are two of my very favorite books. But since I continue to find my footing in contemporary fiction, I’d assign some more-recent books in hopes I’d be able to move students the same way: What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell, A Burning by Megha Majumdar, Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offil, The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I don’t claim to know short story as a form, but I’d also add Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty—there’s too much good happening on the page to leave off.

What books helped guide you while writing your book?

I don’t read a ton while I’m writing; it’s part a function of grabbing what spare time I have to focus on writing, and part because my writing process is so manic and absorptive that I have a hard time getting lost in another universe and giving a book its due. But looking at the couple years leading up to this book, I definitely gravitated toward the lost-millennial-girl women-writer canon, if you will. 

I read a lot of books that went deep into young female interiority, which was something I really needed to mine while writing Just Want You Here. Ari, my main character, has a lot of interior world to recon with, and I wanted to learn about how to write that without suffocating a reader. 

I read everything by Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, and Megan Nolan, and All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankhan Matthews helped me there, too. I also absolutely adored Acts of Service by Lilian Fishman, which taught me a lot about communicating desire. In general, I have a complicated relationship with girl-walks-around novels, which some of these definitely have elements of, but there’s still a lot to learn from the most successful ones.

What books are on your nightstand now?

I have three upcoming novels that I’m very excited about: Foreclosure Gothic by Harris Lathi, Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild, and Things Left Unsaid by Sarah Jafari. (I’m also listening to Good Girl by Aria Aber.)

Rather apropos for this interview, my absolute favorite books are debuts, and I always have one queued up. I think debuts are, in a lot of ways, the rawest a writer will ever get—no matter how much time the author spent on it, it’s still a virgin book. It’s the story so many writers had to get out of their system, and well before I sold my book, that was something with which I could really identify. Before market forces take over and voices really crystallize, I think it’s a special privilege to crawl into a writer’s mind the way you get to with a debut novel, so I go out of my way to read them.