Hillary Berhman‘s debut short story collection, Lake Effect, was selected by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. In it, characters move through wild landscapes and emotionally fraught relationships as they struggle with isolation, longing, and the complicated ways people try to care for one another. Spanning settings from Seattle to Istanbul, these stories explore intimacy, family, labor, and dislocation in lives shaped as much by emotional distance as by fierce human connection.
We asked Berhman 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?
Oh, there were so many, but as a very little kid, I’d probably say, Around the World with Aunt and Bee by Angela Banner or Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. When I was a bit older I got obsessed with Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. I had a whole plan to run away on a train to NYC.
What book helped you through puberty?
I read Our Bodies, Ourselves by The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, like it was the Bible, especially Chapter 5, “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes.” On the fiction side of things, I’d say, S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
Cruddy by Lynda Barry and Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
It would have to be a very long class, because there really is a lot of “Damn Good Writing” in this world. So, I’ve tried to narrow it down a bit by just including fiction written in English and mostly authors from the US.
- It Lasts Forever, and Then It’s Over by Anne De Marcken
- On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
- God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
- What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
- The Bluest Eye or everything by Toni Morrison
- Women Talking by Miriam Toews
- The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
- Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Again, too many to count… so I will stick to craft books and story collections.
Craft Books
- The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
- Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat
- Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter
- A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
Short Story Collections
- Lot by Bryan Washington
- Honeydew by Edith Pearlman
- Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
- Mothers, Tell Your Daughters by Bonnie Jo Campbell
- All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell
- Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
- Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
- Separate Kingdoms by Valerie Laken
- Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff
- Other Voice, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
What books are on your nightstand now?
The stack is on the nightstand and on the floor next to my bed. Here are some of them…
- The Idea of an Entire Life by Billy-Ray Belcourt
- Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada
- On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle
- They by Helle Helle
- Elita by Kristen Sundberg Lunstrom
- Whidbey by T Kira Madden
- Kin by Tayari Jones
- A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariane Enriquez
- The Book of Disbelieving by David Laurence Morse
- The Wax Child by Olga Ravn
- Brawler by Lauren Groff