"I think of this book as a secret key to understanding the division between stealth “passing” trans women and out trans women in our current culture. Quicksand is about a woman with a mixed background who escapes the racial injustice of America to Denmark in the 1920s. The thing that I’ve always thought was so curious was that Larsen published these books and then became a nurse, never to publish again. Larsen’s life is a mysterious allegory to her writing."

"Having come to music production via electronic music first, I had to go back at some point and try and figure out how to write songs. Learning how to do so involved picking apart my favourite songs, including this piece of perfect concision. It’s a great reminder that those artists like Wire who pushed forward the boundaries of the avant-garde are by no means exempted from writing a perfect pop song every once in a while, when it strikes their fancy."

"That’s a movie that was really, really funny. It’s about grownups. It’s about grownups having grownup problems. There’s no bad guys in it. It’s really funny and really moving and really complicated and messy. Honestly, when we were writing The Big Sick, that was a movie that we used as a reference point, to be like, “If we can try and make a movie that’s similar to Broadcast News in tone, then at least we’re trying to the right kind of thing.”"

"Back in high school, my best friend gave me a tattered paperback of Boy Wonder by the late/great James Robert Baker. We’d been into making movies, writing stories, and living imaginatively since kindergarten, and this gonzo, out-of-print novel about a young-madman-turned-Hollywood-super-producer had it all. Boy Wonder is the perfect summer read, a fount of crazed inspiration, laugh-out-loud funny, and to this day, one of the most seminal reading experiences I’ve had."

"Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all constantly responding to, or writing back against, the Homeric poems. The Athenian tragedy that is maybe most deeply engaged with rewriting and recreating “The Odyssey,” is Euripides' “Helen”, a provocative, brainy, funny play about the myth that Helen never went to Troy in the first place—the same myth that is central to HD's brilliant sequence “Helen in Egypt.” I translated the Euripides “Helen,” for a collection of Greek tragedy translations, “The Greek Plays.”"

"Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars. One of the most underrated and under-appreciated films of all time and my favorite comedy. Kurt Russell is genius in this film and I wish he would return to comedies because his delivery and timing are to die for. Excellent supporting cast including the wonderful Jack Warden who plays two characters — dueling brothers. And kudos to Zemeckis and [co-writer] Bob Gale for writing a biting, social satirical and very un-PC script. “Jesus Palomino!”"

"It’s not often that a writer makes me laugh out loud, but [David] Sedaris does. He brings me to tears. It’s to the point where I can’t read his writing in public because people think I’m having some kind of meltdown. In this collection of essays, [When You Are Engulfed in Flames] he has a way of finding humour in the strangest and most painful moments, like a week with a creepy baby-sitter, or the death of his mother."