One of my greatest joys whenever I finish writing a book is re-entering the zone of whimsical, spontaneous reading. While I am at work on a long manuscript, I am always careful about what I read, particularly during the first draft. I think of this as going on a reading diet—mainly to prevent harm coming my way, to protect my budding voice. For instance, although I love Jonathan Franzen’s fiction, reading his novels when I write is dangerous for me, because they are thick on dialogue and thin on mood, whereas my ratio is the reverse. Franzen’s powerful voice can easily silence my own. Instead, I read works with textures more similar to mine. 

Up until six months ago, I had been working for two years on Imperfect, a book that explores how the way we look can shape our lives. This required reading a lot for research—anything about the body and its appearance, including empirical studies, investigative journalism, works by philosophers, historians and psychologists, and memoirs by people whose appearance deviates from the so-called norm (most notably, Lucy Grealy’s wonderful Autobiography of a Face). Most of what I read didn’t explicitly make it into the book, but everything stimulated my thinking and writing.