"The documentarians David and Albert Maysles found some real-life Tennessee Williams characters in Edith and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, mother and daughter eccentrics holed up for years in a sagging, cat-and-raccoon-infested mansion in otherwise grand East Hampton. The ladies’ kinship with cousin Jackie Bouvier Kennedy explains their old-money sense of entitlement, but nothing can explain why two people would want to hammer away at each other for decades on end the way these two trapped souls do. Except that maybe you’d do the same thing under the same circumstances. I’d like to think I would, anyway."

"I’m a film school nerd, so I’ve got about a hundred favorite movies. I’d feel like I was cheating on all of them if I narrowed it down to five movies. But con man movies I can do. In no particular order, I guess the first one I’d name is Paper Moon, which, for me, is just a perfect film. It’s also one of the first con man movies I saw that was less about the mechanics of plot and more about the relationships between the characters, and this father-daughter relationship, which is really beautiful. Just a pretty wonderful movie."

"To Kill a Mockingbird just gets better with age. I’ve read Harper Lee’s masterpiece over and over again. It’s a great read at age 11 and 23 and 35. Recently, at 42, I took it on vacation to read again. Age changes the book, like a painting that changes when you look at it from different angles. I used to spend all my time thinking of Scout. Now I spend most of my time focused on Atticus and Tom and Boo Radley. It’s timeless and perfect; I can’t wait to share a copy with my daughters. Especially with my daughter named Harper."

"A coming-of-age story of two young Catholic girls in Ireland. This is a writer who is a woman, a lover, a daughter, a mother and she tries to bring all that together in her work. So few women writers were doing that in the 1960s. Instead, they were writing through a male persona, because they knew that otherwise they wouldn't be taken seriously. But as O'Brien says, 'I am the mother of sons; my sons have given me joy. I am a lover of men, and men have broken my heart -- but they've also given me joy."

"It’s about how feminism fails to address the relationship between mothers and daughters because of its emphasis on escaping the house. I didn’t finish it—who has the time or the energy to read when you’re a new mom?—but I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things—a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace."