"The autobiographical essays in this collection cover faith and family, booze, men, and self-love. They’re full of the small moments in Lamott’s life, the observations that make you laugh really hard and make you bawl really fast—two of my favorite activities. She talks about how the most popular prayers are ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ I’ve read all her work, and she continually surprises me and speaks to me. One of the lines from this book that I love is: ‘All you can do is show up for someone in crisis. Your there-ness…can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding.’ That’s just killer."

"A compilation from South Africa in the 80s of Soweto sound at the time. My mum's from SA and she had it on double cassette and would play it in the car as she drove me to school. It's full of unashamed joy and has a kind of cheesiness to it that I love. There's an innocence to the songs, which is interesting because you can sense the strange American influence in SA music at the time - which is similarly mirroring some current musical trends from abroad. You can hear Prince, a bit of Michael Jackson and American pop, but retranslated through musicians and equipment that they had access to at the time. It's a killer compilation."

"Man Bites Dog is a Belgian film in 1992. It’s about a film crew that starts following a serial killer around, and he’s charming and disarming and delightful, and he kills people with this film crew never interceding. The first time you see it, you’re like, “Wait a minute,” and you laugh a few times, and the second time, you laugh the whole time. It’s a bleak, dark comedy, but my god, it’s so funny. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was before the onslaught of reality television, but it makes a perfect comment on it now. It had subtitles and I still loved it. I laughed so hard."