I wrote the first draft of my debut hardcover, The Seventh Ribbon, during 2020’s quarantine, when we all wished we had a little more control over things. The fact that this novel involved literally rewriting one’s own reality was – strictly speaking – a coincidence, as I’d mulled the idea for years, but the timing still proved quite providential.
As other authors have played in similar sandboxes over the years, I am pleased to present ten personally beloved tomes about people living in worlds of their own creation, both literally and metaphorically, for better and for worse.
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The decade is the 1960s, and Seymour “Swede” Levov is living the American Dream. When his daughter becomes radicalized and commits a violent political act, however, his carefully constructed illusions collapse. The tragedy is not only what Swede’s daughter has done, but the fact that he cannot reconcile the person she’s become with the person he raised. Swede spends the rest of his days being driven to near-madness trying to answer one question: how could the life he built so deliberately produce someone who rejected it so completely? Roth’s novel hammers home the idea that self-created worlds can become prisons for those unwilling to venture outside of them. A narrative knockout, and one of the best depictions of living inside PTSD ever put to paper.
Mild-mannered teacher and recent divorcee Jake Epping is given the extraordinary opportunity to travel back to 1958, to reside for years in anticipation of preventing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What begins as an exercise in altruism soon becomes something much more volatile: the construction of an entirely new life, the discovery of a new love, and the embracing of new a set of personal circumstances he realizes he can’t bear to leave behind. The central question then becomes not whether changing the past is practically achievable, but whether any hypothetical/aspirational scenario can ever truly improve on the life directly in front of you. A close contender for my favorite thing King ever wrote, which in an oeuvre of sixty-plus novels is quite the feat.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
The Walls family lives within a world of its parents’ creation. Through sheer will, day after day, Rex and Rose Mary Walls transform instability into freedom, neglect into self-reliance, poverty into philosophy. The Walls children have learned to inhabit Mom and Dad’s reality chiefly because they have no other choice, having been raised inside a fictitious bubble that is both undeniably corrosive and oddly empowering. Eventually, of course, the children must construct realities of their own, at which point the narrative becomes a story of escaping one’s physical circumstances without disregarding its influences. One of the only memoirs I’ve ever encountered that reads like a thriller as you race toward the (hopefully) conclusive assurance that author Jeannete and her siblings come through things okay.
Although protagonist Dana Franklin is literally – and involuntarily – transported between twentieth-century California and the antebellum South, the deepest alternate world of Kindred is psychological. Dana is forced into the corporeal reality that history has allowed later generations to experience in the abstract or in some cases sidestep entirely. Dana’s repeated journeys, however, force her to understand how an entire nation could construct a system in which human beings are treated as property… and, in the process, forces the reader to ponder which of their present-day circumstances will one day be viewed as similarly intolerable. An ahead-of-its-time piece of allegorical fiction that has arguably become more relevant with age.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Few characters in literature construct their own realities as deliberately or thoroughly as Edmond Dantès. Betrayed and falsely imprisoned, Dantès emerges from captivity reborn, discovering an immense fortune and using it to manufacture a new identity: the Count of Monte Cristo, a near-supernatural figure with the power to infiltrate the worlds of those who destroyed him. Moral complications arise as his mission requires Dantès to play God, unilaterally deciding who deserves punishment and who has earned mercy. His new reality has granted Dantès extraordinary power… but forces him to confront the dangers of becoming unable to distinguish justice from vengeance. I had read capital-L literature prior to Monte Cristo at the behest of school syllabi, but this was the first time I can remember something from the nineteenth century absolutely blowing my mind.
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Every relationship exists in two timelines: the life we remember and the life we’re living. This phenomenon is made literal through the story of Henry De Tamble, a man living with a genetic disorder that causes him to travel uncontrollably backward and forward through time. Henry’s situation sees him repeatedly crossing paths with Clare Abshire, destined to become the love of his life. Though quickly enamored, Henry and Clare cannot control when they meet, how long they’re together, or when they lose each another, rendering a traditional shared life all but impossible while highlighting an emotional truth: to love someone completely is to love all versions of them along a lengthy and unpredictable timeline. A story that often favors notions of predestination, The Time Traveler’s Wife nevertheless makes a strong case for fighting for our best reality.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Arguably diluted by centuries’ worth of adaptations, A Christmas Carol remains one of the greatest and most influential stories ever told. Proprietor, financier, and notorious miser Ebenezer Scrooge sees no need to question his existing dogma: money matters more than generosity, isolation trumps intimacy, and the suffering of others is none of his concern. Then, of course (through the first use of time travel in popular fiction!), Scrooge is given the opportunity to visit echoes and variations of his own life, forced to confront the fact that one’s future is not preordained, but the logical consequence of one’s own deeds. Scrooge’s famous redemption thus comes only once he accepts a single shining truth: it’s never too late to change.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Enid and Alfred Lambert have spent decades constructing their ideal family, even as their three adult children build their own competing realities in turn. Gary has shaped an identity around professional and financial success; Chip has repeatedly reinvented himself; Denise has striven for a life of achievement. As each family member has ideas how to correct the others, the novel’s title thus becomes almost aspirational: each character believes their fundamental flaws can be repaired if only the right adjustment is made. The narrative continually undermines this fantasy, however, as static reality repeatedly rears its head, reminding us that human beings are not problems in need of solutions, and no amount of corrections will never lead to fulfillment.
Seeing as how it would be impossible for me to confine any literary list to a single King, we come now to the hitman Billy Summers, a professional with an unusual rule: only kill bad guys. This moral code allows Summers a reality wherein his inherently violent profession can coexist with a sense of decency. But when Billy flees the scene of a suspicious assignment, he stumbles into another world altogether, and a friendship with twenty-one-year-old Alice Maxwell, who reveals the true power of narrative fiction: the ability to understand our own lives. A man who’s spent years pretending to be someone else soon discovers that his invented persona may be closer to his true self, while a third act reveal recontextualizes what’s come before, particularly within the realm of rewritten realities.
The nonfiction world of Tara Westover is not merely unconventional; it is a reality governed entirely by its own rules. History, religion, illness, and even identity are interpreted according to the family’s internal mythology, and Tara initially has no independent reality against which to measure this perspective. In this context, education itself thus becomes more than the acquisition of knowledge; it is the discovery that other realities even exist. As Tara rebels by entering series of conventional school systems, she begins constructing an identity determined by factors other than the reality into which she was born. Ultimately, Educated is about the painful realization and acknowledgment that we are all born into systems, and all possess the terrifying freedom to forge our own path.
ABPOUT THE AUTHOR: Gus Krieger is a writer, producer, director, and mentor working across multiple mediums. His film credits include The Killing Room, The Binding, and My Name Is Myeisha. His debut novel, the Audible Original Superworld, was optioned by Warner Bros. Entertainment for director Jason Bateman. An Associate Artistic Director of The Porters of Hellsgate Theatre Company, Krieger has premiered original works at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, and The Group Rep at the Lonny Chapman Theatre. Since 2016, he has served as a screenwriting mentor for Stephens College. He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful daughter.