Patrick Strickland is the author of Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe’s Anti-Fascist Struggle, The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, and You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece.
His debut short story collection, A History of Heartache, is filled with fourteen stories that chart the small mercies and big mistakes that make a life.
We asked him to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
By no standard could you say I had much of a literary upbringing. It’s tough to remember the first book that ever obsessed me as a child, but it was most likely something in the Goosebumps series. Funny enough, I can’t remember a single individual book from that series now. My mom worked nights, and sometimes I would read her old paperbacks — John Grisham, Stephen King, etc. — and one title that pops out to me again now is William Diehl’s thriller Primal Fear, which was one of the more disturbing books in the room whenever our teachers at school gave us free time to read.
What book helped you through puberty?
Puberty remains a fog to me now, and if I read anything, not much stuck with me. Later in my teenage years, I read Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero and Albert Camus’s The Stranger only because I found them for a few bucks each in a used bookshop. I’m unsure how much either helped me, but I think both probably assisted me in making sense of a kind of default nihilism that was common among the people I grew up around.
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
As an 18-year-old growing up in Texas, I wish I had found a handful of authors long before I did — Larry Brown, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Mark Richard, to name a few. If I had to pin down just one, I have to say I wish I found Denis Johnson’s Angels at 18. I would have been drawn to writing much, much sooner, I expect, had I known that moving and powerful books could be molded from the lonely strip malls and dirty bars I saw around me and the plain-spoken poetry everyday folks used in daily conversation.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I’m not convinced that my personal favorites are always the most helpful in learning how to write, but I would pick a somewhat eclectic mix of titles to help aspiring writers across a handful of considerations.
Mark Richard’s The Ice at the Bottom of the World, in my view, offers one lesson after another on how strangely you can deploy language — and one of the stories, “Strays,” is a masterclass in how to write from a child’s perspective.
Barry Gifford’s Wild at Heart because it is a great example of how a short, pared-down novel with incredibly brief chapters can not only tell a compelling story but also take a handful of your gut and get in your feelings.
I would probably throw in a couple titles by Megan Abbott, whose books are always well-done and whose plotting is really something to see. The best crime writers, like Abbott, teach you how to tie the pieces together when your plot starts flapping in the wind.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
There are too many to count, but the books that helped guide me the most were ones written by authors who had crafted their own distinct, sharp voices. For instance, a short story collection called Stardust, 7-Eleven, Route 57, A&W, and So Forth — written by one of my former teachers, Patricia Lear — was one that really inspired me when I first started writing the stories in my book. S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland, a really stellar novel, was another that inspired me to sit down and make myself write. Alan Heathcock’s unmatchable collection Volt, on top of simply being a great book, gave me an eye for hard, focused work on the level of the sentence.
What books are on your nightstand now?
At this moment, I’ve got a stack of books on my nightstand, a couple new reads and a few rereads. I just reread Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom, a bizarre and fun assortment of stories. Right now, I’m reworking my way through Barry Hannah’s Captain Maximus, a short collection but one with a few stories that really shriek. Another book I’m excited to pick up soon is Bette Pesetsky’s Stories Up to a Point. There are three or four books there by Percival Everett. I discovered him too late, but I’m now doing my damnedest to read everything he’s ever written.