I’LL BE HONEST: This preface didn’t write itself. I struggled with these words, the ones you’re reading now. And that surprised me, even though I’ve learned that writing is rarely easy, because I really thought this would be a breeze.
After all, the goal was straightforward. I only needed to introduce this collection, which grows out of “By Heart,” an online series I created for The Atlantic in 2013. I’ve been explaining the approach for years: I ask working artists (many of them writers) to choose a favorite passage from literature, the lines that have hit them hardest over the course of a lifetime’s reading. Each person looks closely at his or her selection, explains its personal impact, and makes a case for why it matters. Taken together, these pieces offer a rare glimpse into the creative mind at work—how artists learn to think, how they find inspiration, and how they get things done.
But it turned out to be harder than I expected to settle on a single frame. These pieces—which start as phone or coffee table conversations, then become transcripts that I edit and send back to the writer to polish and complete—are part memoir, part literary criticism, part craft class, part open studio. They take on an array of big topics: identity, adversity, ethics, aesthetics. Not to mention that each writer draws from a private well of experience, and their interests vary widely. Over the course of more than 150 interviews for The Atlantic, as well as brand-new ones for this book, I’ve felt like a perpetual student—of creative writing and literature, sure, but also of sociology, psychology, and political science. Every week I have private office hours with a different brilliant teacher. But though each writer had been asked the same simple question, no single thesis seemed to capture the richness of their responses. Trying to find one was as hard—almost—as choosing a single favorite line from all the passages you cherish.
Then something happened. It’s an experience these writers often describe having, I’ve noticed, when things become difficult: I found the way forward between the covers of another book.
This time, it was Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The New Life, which begins with this incredible first sentence: “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” What a way to start! Pamuk counters the expectations we bring to a story’s first pages—go ahead, dazzle me—with a fictionalized experience of ecstatic reading. The narrator’s head, as he reads, seems to float off his shoulders. The pages themselves shine with penetrating light. And that’s when he realizes: He’ll never be the same, not after this.
I’d picked the novel almost randomly from my shelf, and read these words in disbelief—it was as if they’d been written for me. Because they’re exactly what this book is about, and as I read them I suddenly understood the approach that I needed to take here.
At the core of each of these pieces is a moment of transformative reading—an encounter with a short, artful sequence of words that hits with life-altering force. Whether the crucial encounter happened decades ago or just last week, each contributor tells some version of the same story: I read something, and I wasn’t the same afterward. It might seem fantastical, at first, the way Pamuk’s narrator looks down on luminous pages while his head floats near the ceiling. But the authors in this collection, like everyone who’s felt themselves transfigured by a work of art, know it’s not too far from real-life experience. Aimee Bender explains how lines by Wallace Stevens made her heart race and mind sparkle, like she’d downed a few strong espressos. A passage in Anna Karenina made Mary Gaitskill physically rise to her feet, the words too intense to take sitting down. David Mitchell calls a cherished James Wright poem a “skull melter,” a coinage I love: It conjures a sense of intense light and heat, and also of the cage of the head dissolving away, allowing the mind, the self, to blend freely with the world outside. It really can feel like that, stumbling on the right words at the right time. This book seeks to put that indescribable experience into concrete language.
But what do we mean, really, when we say this book changed my life? And what’s happening in those heightened minutes of engagement, as our heads seem to fill with helium, as our feet pull from the floor? After years of interviewing writers, I think I’ve found the simplest way to say it: It’s about problem-solving. It’s akin to what scientists call “the aha! moment”—the instant when the solution to some complex problem becomes clear. These accounts reckon with that strange, heightened sensation, the feeling of a momentous realization sinking in. Then, they chart the unpredictable path ideas take from genesis to maturity, mapping the way creative epiphanies come into being, grow, and take enduring shape.
Some of these pieces describe creative breakthroughs—moments when another book points the way forward, like what happened to me with Pamuk and this preface. In the snaking cadences of Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes, for instance, Viet Thanh Nguyen found the voice he needed to begin a novel about the Vietnam War—the book that became his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut. As these writers describe overcoming artistic challenges, you’ll also find insight into craft: master classes on beginnings and endings, plot and character, sound and rhythm, finding inspiration, beating writer’s block. But none of this, I should say, belongs to the general, cheerless genre of “writing advice.” It’s something far more useful, and it extends into any creative activity: Specific individuals share how they solved specific problems, day by day, and book by book.
Some of these breakthroughs take place on a far more personal level—these writers describe reaching fundamental insights about who they are and how they want to live. Toni Morrison’s Beloved taught an angry Rutgers student named Junot Díaz that his identity had been shattered by injustice, but also that great art could provide a kind of glue. And it took an Adrian C. Louis poem for Sherman Alexie to understand that literature wasn’t just Joyce Kilmer and John Keats: It was also on the Spokane reservation where he grew up, waiting for him. Not that everyone reaches such clarity, not all the time. Sometimes, it’s just the feeling that a book has enlarged you somehow, providing you not so much with answers as with better, clearer questions. As Pamuk’s protagonist describes it:
This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace. . . . My whole life was changing as I read the new words on each new page.
These writers inhabited one world when they turned the page. By the time they flipped it again, they inhabited another universe entirely. Something about the way the words were written aged them in an instant and provided a glimpse of who they would now have to become.
The Wallace Stevens poem Aimee Bender discusses, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” is about the power of the imagination to break down barriers. It’s about the ability we all share to enliven our world through imagination and creativity. In Stevens’s telling, that power is no less than god-like: “We say God and the imagination are one . . . / How high that highest candle lights the dark.” That’s the experience told and retold in this book, the moment when the high candle of the mind beams incandescent, bringing clarity to what had been obscure, mysterious, overlooked, and forgotten—lighting up the dark.
Isn’t that what you’re looking for, too? The kind of encounter described in these pieces—when a few words take off the top of your skull and let the light shine in? I’m guessing that’s why you hold this book in your hands, even now. A life can change in a paragraph, in a turn of phrase, in a single well-used word. This book maps the way to many of those moments. Let it re-create the experience of wandering through a well-curated bookstore, everything secondhand. Feel yourself fill with the anticipation that this time, maybe, the passage you stumble on will draw a vivid line, that clear before and after. Can you smell the yellowing pages, softened by years of thumbs? Can you feel your fingers brush these spines? Take something down. Each one has been chosen for a reason. And if it changes your life, too, you’re not alone.
JOE FASSLER