Dana Schwartz's Reading List

"One, because I love it. If you haven’t read it yet, you absolutely need to. But the reason I thought it was important for navigating your twenties is that we see these two characters throughout their lives. We see how the decisions they make in their early twenties extend through their late fifties and until their deaths. It’s also one of the most realistic depictions of a relationship I’ve seen in a book. So often in books, we either get the characters who are destined to be together, and they get together and that’s the end. Or, we see the dissolving of a marriage or a love. It was incredibly powerful to read a story about a growing love, and how there are cracks in the façade. These two people are incredibly relatable in different ways, and every young person should have that relationship not as a model, but as an example. I was sad when the first narrative ended, because I thought, ‘I was just getting into his head!’ But Groff gets back in my good graces immediately with an equally compelling character in Mathilde. Also, when you’re a young person you can be incredibly narcissistic. Fates and Furies does this amazing thing of forcing you to slip every interaction and recognise that you’re not the only one in that relationship, and that the other person also has a backstory and internal life that you should pay attention to."

"Yeah! What I love about this book is it’s a character who turns 40. She’s single; she doesn’t have the career success she probably wanted to when she was 20. If I go beyond that, I’ll poke into the narrative and spoil it. But it’s important that people can recognise that success doesn’t always look like you thought it was going to look like. Having a partner is not always the highest goal that you should be striving for. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Jami Attenberg is phenomenal at building these dark, sympathetic characters who often are alone, but happy in being alone. They aren’t constantly searching for a boyfriend. Spoiler-alert: in my book, I spent my early twenties really thinking that if I had the right partner, I’d become the right person. I thought, ‘As soon as I find a person who wants me, then everything I want will fall into place.’ It turns out that’s not the case—who would have guessed? But reading Jami Attenberg, especially All Grown Up, really speaks to that in a funny and incredibly helpful way. Yes. It’s unapologetic in the best way. You can be single and live life on your own terms, without children, without the things that society says a woman is supposed to have, and be happy."

"People feel very strongly about Caitlin Moran. There are some essays in her book I disagree with politically. But it’s an exercise in being unapologetic. She writes with such fire and conviction. I want every woman in the world to express that with her own beliefs. It was the first time I read a book and thought, ‘We’re allowed to say that? I’m allowed to say these sorts of things?’ That’s what people should take away from that book: how much fire is in her prose. Trying not to be ashamed. There’s still a cultural stigma against women having sex with multiple partners. I’d shamed myself for it, thinking that every man I’d slept with was supposed to fall in love with me, was supposed to be a prince that would sweep me off my feet and bring me to the castle. Coming to terms with the fact that you can get what you need in a night and learn from it, even if it’s painful, was really important in writing this memoir and sending it off into the world. Absolutely. That’s why I built my book around the idea of a personality quiz, because this is an age where we love categorising and putting a label on ourselves, and finding a clique or a group. I’m a Gryffindor, I’m a whatever. We love these quizzes that tell you who you are, because this is a time in your life where you don’t know who you really are. Plenty of these decisions were based on me pretending to be a certain type of girl. Definitely. Because you don’t know who you are, and you don’t think you’re given permission to be yourself. No one knows what that even means! So you try different versions to see what works. To see what sticks."

"Yes. Every twentysomething needs to have this book on the reference shelf next to the dictionary. It includes tips on how to write a thank you note, how to clean a bathroom, how to ask for a raise at work, what you’re supposed to do after a job interview. It’s the most practical guide to those little things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. There’s something in it that everyone should re-teach themselves. “There’s a difference between being able to be a functional adult and being able to be a good adult” I know the phrase ‘adulting’ has sort of become a bit of a joke, in the sense of: ‘Why do you need to learn how to become an adult?’ But there’s a difference between being able to be a functional adult and being able to be a good adult who knows how to keep in touch with friends and maybe cook one dish. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I also think a personality I put on briefly was ‘the mess who doesn’t know how to live her life’—part of that is even in the title to Choose Your Own Disaster . But the fact of the matter is that that’s not a super charming person to be, and I want to be someone who knows how to roast a chicken and write a thank you note. That is a question that I’ve wrestled with in my head. By my age, my mom had met my dad and begun setting up her family. I don’t know if it’s that we’re immature, but we have moved the goalposts for what it is we want to accomplish. Women are, in a good way, pickier with their significant others—you don’t have to marry young and pop out three babies by the time you’re thirty. It’s a win culturally for women in general that we have more time to explore our potentials before we’re just relegated into being mothers. And once we’re mothers, the universe is still open to us. What’s often attributed to a lack of maturity should also be attributed to some cultural wins—that we don’t need to get married by twenty-one; you’re not old by twenty-five. Yeah, it’s a funny book. I think I gave it to my high school friends for graduation. It’s the perfect book: you don’t have to be embarrassed about the things you don’t know. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge. Everyone, even a generation ago. By addressing that conversationally and with humour, this book makes you feel like you’re okay for the things you don’t know, and we still have time to learn."

"Roxane Gay is a brilliant writer. The way she’s able to express herself and her vulnerabilities in such an open and honest way is something I hope I was able to imitate in my work. But it’s a perspective on body that every young woman should read. So much culturally for women is tied up in our bodies: our worth, our sexuality. Culturally, we’ve been told that if our body isn’t a certain way, then you don’t have value. That’s an idea Roxane Gay—more eloquently than anyone—challenges and breaks down with humour and vulnerability. Absolutely. Someone actually asked me a question the other day that I had to stop and think about. I had binge-eating disorder, but I lost the weight when I learned to curtail that behaviour. Someone asked: ‘Do you think that you could’ve written about this if you weren’t down to a societally acceptable weight?’ And I thought, I don’t know if I could have! I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to write about this if the problem was still ongoing and I didn’t fit a certain culturally accepted ‘look.’ That was just something I needed to stop and say, because I’m scared and I’m still vulnerable. All the things that I was ashamed of when I suffered from binge-eating disorder without telling anyone—that shame is still somewhere inside. Women are taught this shame from an early age. So, Roxane Gay’s writing and her acceptance of her body is something all women should learn from and emulate. That’s one way to look at it. But it’s also good to look at it as an opportunity: here’s the time where you can figure it out. Fortunately, food doesn’t have to be something you suffer from for the rest of your life. It can be something you’re able to get a hold of and embrace in a positive way. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter If you can make peace with your body in your twenties, that will set you up for a much happier thirties and forties. It’s still something I’m working on, but I know I wouldn’t have been able to write about it as openly and honestly as I did if there weren’t people like Roxane Gay teaching me how to do it. It has been incredibly gratifying, heartbreaking and heart-opening to hear how many girls—and boys—have suffered and haven’t been able to talk about it. Especially binge-eating disorder, which is so stigmatised and shamed, and seen as so embarrassing. I feel incredibly grateful for the people who are able to reach out to me and tell me that my words helped them in any way. These are issues that when light is shined on them, they become less shameful. I recognise myself, but I wouldn’t make those same decisions today, I think. There are aspects of myself, obviously, that have carried through, but at times I just want to give my past self a hug. I was really insecure and lonely a lot of the time, and I wish my past self could have read this book and realised that things will turn out okay."