"My five favorite films would change from, you know, day to day, but if you want five of my favorite films, one would have to be The Rules of the Game, by Renoir. A fabulous upstairs-downstairs look at French society in a very particular period. It’s both unbelievably sad and tragic, and moving and funny. And a delightfully humanist film. In fact, a lot of my favorite films are like that."

"This album was introduced to me by John Legend who actually played the title song for me while we were writing—he played it on the piano and sang it at first. It was so striking, I said, 'What is that?" And then he played me the actual record and it instantly became a favorite for me. The way her voice breaks is so moving. She totally caught pure honesty and that's inspiring."

"For me, this film is about the pleasure of entering into an outsider’s observations of one’s own territory. A German filmmaker comes to rural Wisconsin in the mid-1970s, and sees things that I might take for granted, and shows how ridiculous or moving they are. The emotional range is tremendous. Herzog is not afraid of symbolism. The ending, featuring a dancing chicken in a highway rest stop sideshow, is absurdly devastating."

"The only novel really to do anything true with the waves of revolt in Italy in the mid and late 1970s (until I wrote mine, heh). The voice here is transfixing. The end is so incredibly moving. You will need to adapt to Balestrini’s style of forgoing punctuation, but once you do, you’ll be riding a bike with no hands on the bars and you won’t even notice that you, too, are doing something new."

"A beauty supply store owner of a certain age loses her husband, and thinks that’s the end – but her friends rally around her, and various members of her complicated family (her sister, her daughter, the stepson who’s come into her life as an adult) still need her love and competence. A funny, moving story with some smart things to say about aging, mental illness, and how a mother’s work is never done."