Annakeara Stinson‘s writing has appeared in Bustle, Brooklyn Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater, IndieWire, Paste, and Marie Claire. Her debut novel, Nerve Damage, has been called “witty, sexy and moving” by PEOPLE. In it, Clarice flees New York for Los Angeles after a terrifying breakup spirals into stalking, harassment, and obsession. But when she believes her ex has resurfaced three years later, her search for the truth sends her into an increasingly unstable psychological spiral where paranoia, trauma, and reality begin to collapse into one another.
We asked Stinson 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?
Junie B. Jones and the Stupid, Smelly Bus by Barbara Park. I love a gal shot out of the womb with a POV and that’s JBJ.
What book helped you through puberty?
Reading in general was a lifeline through that time. In early puberty I loved those serial books, The Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High. Then books by my girl V.C. Andrews––those were always about mistreated orphans falling in love or siblings finding out their dad is their uncle. Important material. I also loved Lois Lowry, Beverly Cleary, and Madeline L’Engle.
Two books I remember reading in my early teens — Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver and How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. Both alerted me to how much I loved reading about family dynamics. They felt luscious and complicated, romantic, infused with setting. Julia Alvarez taught at Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT which was where I spent the second half of my adolescence, and although I didn’t know her, something about her proximity made me feel like authors were real humans with lives, and that planted a seed about what I wanted for myself. Also Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I was one of those kids, that book hit me hard. I read it when I was 14 and realized, Oh, ok, that’s voice. I have a visceral memory of the vulnerable consciousness it awakened.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
Books have found me at the right time, as we know, they are magical that way. I went to college early at a school called Simon’s Rock (it’s part of Bard but had its own campus at that point) so I got exposed to a lot of big ideas as a teenager. We didn’t have to take the SATS to apply but we had to send in an essay about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, that was the vibe. So I’m thinking more of books I love and would have loved at 16 but didn’t read until later in life: The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures by Phoebe Gloeckner, Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker, Less Than Zero, Brett Easton Ellis, Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the Syllabus?
I’d be so scared to facilitate such a class, but I’ve got my ideas. Magda Szabo, The Fawn. Kenzaburo Oe’s Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City. The Walking Tour by Katherine Davis. Annie Ernaux’s The Years. Hanif Abdurraqib’s The Crown Ain’t Worth Much. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Chiminanda Ngozi, Americanah. Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca. Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season. Melissa Febos, Body Work. Gwendolyn Riley’s First Love. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Fanny Howe’s Nod. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Dorothy B. Hughes, In A Lonely Place. Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion. Virginie Despentes, Vernon Subutex 1. Katixa Agirre, Mother’s Don’t. bell hooks, All About Love. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint. Shirley Hazzard, The Evening of the Holiday. Jen Beagin, Vacuum In The Dark. Melissa Broder, The Pisces. Katie Kitamura, A Separation. Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed. Sheena Patel, I’m A Fan. Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights.
It would take a long time to explain why for all of them uniquely…but something about the voice, movement, or structure in all these books helped me understand how to keep going. Learning about writing while I read happens as, I think, a refinement of intuition.
What books are on your nightstand now?
My whole bedroom area, my entire bed really, is surrounded by books, which a witch once told me is bad for sleep. Too many ideas floating around, apparently, makes a person restless. But on my nightstand, proper, at the moment: Christopher Coe, Such Times. Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives. Elizabeth Crane, This Story Will Change. Yasmin Zaher, The Coin. Chantel V. Johnson, Post-Traumatic. Daphne Du Maurier, The Scapegoat and last but certainly not least, Rokelle Lerner, Affirmations of the Inner Child.