Sydney Rende‘s short stories and travel writing have appeared in Joyland, Carve Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Who What Wear. The writer, who earned her MFA in fiction from Syracuse University, has now published her debut collection of short stories.
I Could Be Famous is a collection of ten stories that follow ten ambitious women and one male superstar as they pursue their (sometimes delusional) dreams and desires.
We asked Rende to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I devoured all the Junie B. Jones books. I fell in love with Junie B. Jones the moment she poured orange juice into her cereal and said, “This is the most delicious breakfast I ever ate. Except for it doesn’t actually taste that good.” That was the first time a book made me laugh out loud, and my first memory of enjoying reading.
What book helped you through puberty?
When I was thirteen, I became completely obsessed with The Outsiders—partly because S.E. Hinton wrote the book when she was sixteen, and at thirteen, I was basically positive that I could do the same. But really, I fell in love with the characters: Ponyboy, Sodapop, Johnny, Dallas, Darry, Two-Bit, Steve, and Cherry. Reading Ponyboy’s voice felt like reading my own mind, and while the story of a gang of greasers getting into knife rumbles in 1960s Tulsa couldn’t have been farther from my reality as a thirteen-year-old prep school kid alone in my pink and green bedroom, I related to those guys so hard. Then I watched the movie—and, well, there’s no time like puberty to discover teenage Rob Lowe.
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
East of Eden, because it would have kicked my ass.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I think the best writing is often found in short stories. There’s less room for mistakes, and each word, sentence, etc. carries more weight. Whenever I forget how to write, I usually turn to a short story. They’re easy to study, and some come pretty close to perfect. Toni Morrison’s “Récitatif” is a pretty perfect story. So is Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” and Grace Paley’s “Wants.” But I think stories are the most enjoyable to read when you can tell the author clearly enjoyed writing them. George Saunders’s “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” and Otessa Moshfegh’s “The Weirdos” are two of those stories for me.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
I thought a lot about voice while writing my collection. A story’s voice can either carry the reader till the end or make them quit one paragraph in. I wanted each story to have a unique but relatable voice, so I turned to writers who have done that for me: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, Lydia Davis’s Can’t and Won’t, Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble, and Anne Beatie’s Walks With Men.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Gingko Season by Naomi Xu Elegant, The Unprofessionals by Julie Hecht, and Everything Alive, an incredible little book of poems by Molly Johnson.