"My personal theory is that the Hays Code didn’t just forbid certain behaviors and images, it also subtly suggested the way that they might one day be allowable. Eventually filmmakers and studios figured out it wasn’t so much that you absolutely couldn’t show homosexuality, drug use, prostitution, child abuse, and mass murder. They just couldn’t seem fun. Or even funny. John Waters joyfully violates this deeper unspoken code. That’s why his films, especially Female Trouble, burn with the raw power of a Public Enemy or Baby Face."

"I just am an Italian girl. My father grew up in that exact era and I remember seeing it in Italian class, in school, and then going home and showing it to him and tears streaming down his face as he watched it. He was a boy with a pair of shoes and who was fascinated by the movies, and there was, like, one theater in his town. So that movie has just always struck a personal nerve for me as a daughter of an immigrant."

"The second non-fiction book by the legendary novelist and screenwriter responsible for such classic films as The Princess Bride (a personal favorite), Marathon Man, All The President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Like the prequel, Which Lie Did I Tell includes candid behind-the-scenes stories, a window into the process of how to write good scripts and how The Princess Bride became his first screen credit in nearly nine years. A thoroughly entertaining insider’s look into how Hollywood works."

"Paul Monette’s memoir is a devastating account of his encounter with a disease that would kill him. It is so intimate and personal that I often felt I was reading someone’s diary and was ashamed to be committing such a gross invasion of another person’s privacy. Paul Monette was not a careless man. He wanted us to know and remember what AIDS did to him. He succeeded more than he could ever have realized. Books about what it means to be human have no expiration date."

"At one point, I was transcribing Shattuck’s journals—I don’t know what happened with that, but as a result I feel connected to this book, which explores early 20th century Paris through the artists of the time, in a strangely personal way. Also, it’s about a writer looking at art, which is what I was doing with the 20th Century Art Book, so there’s a thread of what I like about it in the artist’s perception of art—just curating, showing, explaining, unpacking, translating from abstraction."