Demree McGhee is currently pursuing her MFA at San Diego State University, and her debut story collection, Sympathy for Wild Girls, is already on bookstore shelves. The collection is a knockout selection of stories that move between reality and the surreal. McGhee takes readers to places rarely visited on the page, and the stories dance between fever dreams and stark truths.
We asked McGhee to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers could get to know her and the books that shaped her life.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I really latched onto James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl around the third grade. I had a teacher, who I loved, who narrated it out loud to us as we read along at our desks. She really put her whole body into it, and it was a very impressive performance to me as a child. There’s a somber comfort in that book. James is terrified of this force that sounds mystical and amorphous but also has the real capacity to harm him. I think it was the first book I remember reading that used surreal elements to more accurately describe the intensity of the internal, which was important to me as someone who had a lot of feelings but not the capacity to express them. I also enjoyed the family he forms with those bugs, who are all queer, obviously. I own the same edition that I read in elementary school, the one with the cover illustrated by Lane Smith.
What book helped you through puberty?
Somehow I came across the book The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery in middle school. I think it was the first “adult” book that I ever read. I had to stop every five minutes to look up words I didn’t know, and that process made me feel very intelligent. I think I learn better when I have more time, so it was also one of the first instances where I felt like I was taking control of my education outside of school. One of the main characters is an insightful depressed tween, so I suppose it was the first book that made me feel seen during a time where I was very isolated. I would explain the premise of the book to adults and they would tell me I shouldn’t read it, which only encouraged me to keep reading. I think this was also my first memory of crying at a book, something I do frequently now. I feel like it furthered my capacity to feel empathy which is important for a child.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
I think every teenager should read Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya. I think it could (and should) replace Catcher in the Rye as “the coming-of-age book you have to read in high school.” I’ve taught the book to college freshmen before and they seemed to really enjoy it. I think part of growing up is learning to differentiate your own desires from the desires of the people who raised you. Bless Me Ultima captures the anxiety young people feel when they have to decide what they want their life to look like. Sometimes, especially from an Americentric perspective, growing up seems to mean isolating yourself from whatever encompassed your upbringing, which I’m not sure is entirely possible. I feel like Anaya’s answer as to what to do with your upbringing is that it has no choice but to be a part of your adult life. And this isn’t a bad thing. Your independent self is not detached from your upbringing, it’s informed by it, and you have the choice to be an even more insightful person because of it. The book is also a good gateway to talk about larger prevalent social issues, like colonialism and sexism.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
In a perfect world where I’d have the time to teach multiple full length books in a class (and I wasn’t worried about any cohesive themes or objectives) I’d teach Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, Fledgling by Octavia Butler, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, and There There by Tommy Orange, to name a few. These are all books where I felt fascinated by the writing alone. A very kind friend once told me that he enjoyed my work so much that he’d read a grocery list if I wrote it. That’s the way I feel about these books.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
I wrote the stories in Sympathy over the course of four or five years. I only started writing once I started undergraduate school, so I feel like everything I read during this time has been formative to who I am as a writer and a person—Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh, Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang, Piercing by Ryu Murakami, Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi, My Body by Emily Ratajkowski, Nevada by Imogen Binnie, Black Friend by Ziwe, Diary of a Void by by Emi Yagi, Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, Passing by Nella Larsen, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom, and Things that I do in the dark by June Jordan—to name a few.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Right now I’m reading Honey Mine by Camille Roey and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun by Jackie Wang. However, I’m also the type of person to stop reading in the middle of a book for months because I get distracted by something else, so the books I’m “currently” reading are always in rotation. I just devoured Siren Queen by Nghi Vo which felt like everything I need in a book. It’s the first book I’ve read by Vo, and I found her use of magical realism to be very engaging. Magic saturates the book, the whole thing seems to shimmer.