"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn wasn’t a new book when my mother was young. It’s still luminous, the story of Francie Nolan struggling up in a tenement slum through the cracks in the pavement to reach the sun. It may be the best book I’ve ever read about poverty, parenthood, the immigrant experience, and just about everything else. My firstborn daughter is named Francie Nolan."

"I think that Eraserhead by David Lynch. That’s a movie that I actually had to watch for Blackcoat’s Daughter. It’s one of [director] Oz [Perkins]‘ favorite movies. I was sick when I watched it the first time, but I’ve never seen anything that kind of like stuck with me and disturbed me in a cooler, more powerful way. I really, really enjoy that movie."

"Anne’s frank, witty memoir of her incredible life within the nexus of British aristocracy—born the daughter of an earl, she was lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret and married to one of the most colorful eccentrics of the 20th century, Colin Tennant, the man who bought a barren rock in the Caribbean and turned it into the fabled jet-set paradise of Mustique."

"This is literary kismet, with screenwriter Truman Capote channeling Henry James—and with a child lead bearing the name of my own daughter, Flora. The story, which takes full measure of the spookiness and unknowability of children, has worked in every format—first James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, then the chamber opera of the same name, and finally this liminal black-and-white film."

"Warning: this is one of the most upsetting books I’ve ever read, but it’s a great one. Set in South Africa, a nation struggling to remake itself in the wake of Apartheid, it tracks a professor’s downfall as he suffers a career-ending scandal followed by a horrific episode in the life of his daughter. It’s a Booker-winning book by a Nobel-winning novelist."