Amy Chozick is a bestselling author, screenwriter, and award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Her debut novel, With Friends Like You, follows a struggling new mother whose obsessive search for her long-lost college roommate draws her into a hidden world of sex work, billionaire escorts, and long-buried secrets. Darkly funny and psychologically sharp, the novel explores friendship, motherhood, identity, and the dangerous line between devotion and obsession.
We asked Chozick to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can 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?
Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. I also remember being obsessed with a novel called Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson.
What book helped you through puberty?
The Catcher in the Rye and a bunch of smutty Judith Krantz novels that I read under the covers.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
A Confederacy of Dunces
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (I named my son Cormac, if that tells you anything about how much I love his work.)
Deliverance by James Dickey
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara
The poems of Seamus Heaney
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The Girls by Emma Cline
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
What books are on your nightstand now?
Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski
The Gods of New York by Jonathan Mahler
Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser