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Stephen A. Schwarzman, WHAT IT TAKES

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Stephen A. Schwarzman, WHAT IT TAKES

Stephen: What It Takes is about what I've learned and would like to pass on to younger people, people working in organizations, people who start organizations, and people who run organizations so that they can do a better job, so they can be more successful, so that they can have fuller lives, and so the world can be a better place. That's why I wrote it. Being successful, it requires a lifetime learning model. I wanted to show people how to do that, and simple skills like how to take an interview. There are so many different things that are experience based where other people are doing them either for the first time, or not so well, or they're anxious about it. It’s a little bit of a how-to. It’s disguised a bit with the story of how I went through things like that. I managed to learn and figured out how to create a culture where people are happy, and productive, and don't leave, and are excellent at what they do.

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Danielle Ganek, THE SUMMER WE READ GATSBY

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Danielle Ganek, THE SUMMER WE READ GATSBY

Danielle: I'm always so interested in writing about women who wrestle with their creative ambitions. I'm particularly fascinated, obviously, with writers and people who are doing it with writing. Working with art and wanting to express yourself through art is something in all of the characters that I explored. I'm always trying to get inside that kind of thing and maybe understand it for myself, but create characters who are trying to do that.

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Zibby's Essay, 10 Lessons I Learned From My Friend's 9/11 Death

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Zibby's Essay, 10 Lessons I Learned From My Friend's 9/11 Death

Zibby: I lost my college roommate and best friend, Stacey Sanders, on 9/11. I didn’t just lose her. We all did. I’ve written often about Stace and how her loss affected my life and continues to do so now, 18 years later. I'm releasing a dedicated podcast episode today of me reading three essays I’ve written about Stacey, starting with one I wrote just two weeks after she died for my business school newspaper, one from Redbook, and one that Modern Loss published today.

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Rex Ogle, FREE LUNCH

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Rex Ogle, FREE LUNCH

Rex: When I first started writing it, I had been dabbling in writing short stories about my childhood. I'd write a chapter. Then I'd basically have a panic attack. I was like, I can't keep writing this. Everyone kept saying we need important stories and stories that can help kids live a better life or have a different experience or have hope. When someone said the word hope, I was like, god, I had so little hope as a kid. I wanted to write something that gave hope and showed kids you can live through bad things. You can still come out the other side and be better.

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Claire Dederer, LOVE & TROUBLE: MEMOIRS OF A FORMER WILD GIRL

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Claire Dederer, LOVE & TROUBLE: MEMOIRS OF A FORMER WILD GIRL

Claire: I really, really believe in [the power of the memoir of ordinary life] as something that is this important form. It’s an important female form. It’s an important literature from the point of view of female readers. There is this quality of seeing their own life experience in nonfictional form that makes women feel less alone. There's a lot of pushback against memoir as being too narcissistic or too self-involved. If it’s done with this relationship in mind, there is this moral quality to it. Your job as the memoirist is to say what is true, and what is really difficult, and make the reader feel less alone.

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Jennifer Blecher, OUT OF PLACE

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Jennifer Blecher, OUT OF PLACE

Jennifer: Out of Place is the story of a twelve-year-old girl named Cove who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, which is an island off of Cape Code, with her mom. She's never left the island once in her entire life, which was fine with her until the day that her best friend Nina comes and tells Cove that Nina’s going to be moving to New York City with Nina’s two fathers. In that moment, Cove’s entire life feels like it’s falling apart. She has no idea how to make it better. It’s a story about friendship and mistakes and big acts of courage.

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Michele Filgate, WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON'T TALK ABOUT

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Michele Filgate, WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON'T TALK ABOUT

Michele: The essay was published by Longreads in October of 2017 right after the Weinstein story and Me Too movement took off. It wasn’t originally supposed to be published then, actually. My editor at Longreads, Sari Botton, had slated it for around Thanksgiving since people who have to go home for Thanksgiving who might have complicated relationships with their family members could read it then and possibly relate. As soon as this news story broke, she was like, “Nope. We’re moving this up.” When it came out, I didn't expect it to have the impact that it had. I heard from so many people who related not just to the topic of my essay, but also to the idea of the title of the essay alone, which was “What My Mother and I Don't Talk About.”

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Lisa Perry, LISA PERRY: FASHION - HOMES - DESIGN

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Lisa Perry, LISA PERRY: FASHION - HOMES - DESIGN

Lisa: The thing I'm most proud of over the years is I built a brand DNA. If somebody says Lisa Perry, an image comes to their mind. It’s something that is important in a brand. Young people starting out, if they have a focus, if they like the twenties or they like the fifties or whatever era they like in design, if you stay focused and you're not all over the place, you will become known for something as long as it’s not too narrow. I'm also willing to branch out. You make it modern for today. This is a great way to be able to build on a brand. If I was going to design a bicycle, I know what that's going to look like -- whatever it is, an iPhone cover, anything, lighting -- because it stays within a focus.

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Jack Fairweather, THE VOLUNTEER

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Jack Fairweather, THE VOLUNTEER

Jack: The Volunteer is this extraordinary story about a Polish underground operative who, in 1940, took on a mission to infiltrate Auschwitz, raised a resistance cell inside the camp, and start reporting on Nazi crimes. Incredibly, he succeeded in doing those things, sending out messages to reach the allies that were the first to inform the world about what was happening in Auschwitz. Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that you haven't heard of his story before now because what happened at the end of the story, to cut forwards a little bit, is that he fought against the communist regime that was established after the second world war, was captured and executed, and all trace of his wartime heroics in Auschwitz obliterated by the communist regime. They did not want anyone to know about Pilecki’s story. This great resistance fighter could be an inspiration to people in Poland or beyond.

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Lauren Gershell, Co-Author, THAT'S WHAT FRENEMIES ARE FOR

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Lauren Gershell, Co-Author, THAT'S WHAT FRENEMIES ARE FOR

Lauren: The book is about a woman who lives in New York City who has it all. She has everything she thinks she's ever wanted. She puts a lot of importance on her own social capital. She starts to feel as though her star is fading. She takes on a young spin instructor and in a very mammalian fashion, decides that she's going to make her into a superstar, not necessarily out of the kindness of her own heart but to regain some of the social capital that she thinks she's lost.

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Holly Peterson, IT'S HOT IN THE HAMPTONS

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Holly Peterson, IT'S HOT IN THE HAMPTONS

Holly: I like to set books in a summer community, not just because it’s hot and fun and sexy and lots of great things happen and food is eaten and hopefully good sex scenes and all kinds of juicy stuff, but also because the basis for it is really rife with current issues of inequality and class and differences and learning to talk to each other and deal with each other and have problems. It’s a look at society and where we are today, not just a lite beach read.

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Jane Green, THE FRIENDS WE KEEP

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Jane Green, THE FRIENDS WE KEEP

Jane: A group of people meet at university in the UK in the 1980s. Half are American. Half are English. They live together at university. They become best friends. They swear that they're going to be friends forever and ever. Of course, life gets in the way. They graduate. One of them is harboring this great secret. She really has to withdraw from the others. We follow them individually throughout their lives. Evvie is a model who then is in an abusive marriage and a single mother. We have Topher who’s a soap actor who is gay but has tremendous issues with intimacy. Then we have Maggie. All Maggie has ever wanted is a big country house filled with animals and children. She doesn't get to have the life that she wants. We follow them throughout the course of their lives. Then at their thirtieth reunion, by which time they’ve all completely lost touch, they all show up at their thirtieth reunion. Within minutes, it’s as if time has stopped. They’ve been swept back to those early days. What starts as a fancy, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if we lived together?” becomes a reality. They all move into together. Of course, there is still this secret from the past that is going to show up and threaten to explode and destroy everything that they’ve created.

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Ben Michaelis, YOUR NEXT BIG THING

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Ben Michaelis, YOUR NEXT BIG THING

Ben: The inner critic, usually it comes from a good place, which is an instinct for self-preservation. That's really useful. The problem is that you can't be safe your whole life or else you don't have any life. Part of the process of maturation is figuring out which of those things is right for you and which of those is wrong for you. When you think of the world as dangerous, then you can't be creative. You can't play. You can't explore. Most doors are two-way doors. You could walk in and walk out.

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Ricardo Cortés, PARTY and GO THE F*CK TO SLEEP

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Ricardo Cortés, PARTY and GO THE F*CK TO SLEEP

Ricardo: How I map out a story like this is basically on a back of a napkin. I'm doing storyboarding out of what I think are the important beats. In terms of illustrating itself, the way I work best is actually working with models or working with actual children. The illustrations in this book [Party] are pretty -- maybe photorealistic is a way to describe it. They look like actual children. It’s not really stylized. The kids in the story are actually some friends of mine that I did a series of photoshoots with and tried to storyboard out certain actions and emotions.

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Jamaica Kincaid, PARTY

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Jamaica Kincaid, PARTY

Jamaica: I didn't know that people still wrote serious literature. I thought they just wrote penguin detective stories and romances. I didn't know that there was such a thing as writing. I must have always wanted to be an artist or something because I thought I would be a photographer. I studied photography. I began to write out the photographs. It occurred to me then that I'm a writer. I quit the college I was going to in New Hampshire, returned to New York, and started to write. The funny thing about being in America, at least in those days -- I don't know, anymore, what America is like. In those days, whatever you said you were, people said, “Oh, yes. That's what you are because you said so.” I said I was a writer. People said yes. One thing led to the other. Then I started to write for The New Yorker. It’s an improbable tale, but all too true. Every word of it is true.

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Heather Hansen, THE ELEGANT WARRIOR

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Heather Hansen, THE ELEGANT WARRIOR

Heather: For twenty years, I've defended doctors and hospitals when they get sued. While it’s been a privilege and an honor, it’s also very stressful and hard in that trials are a zero-sum game. Someone wins. Someone loses. That means that sometimes it can get quite aggressive. I was finding that during those times of trial, I wanted to maintain who I was and be true to the choices that I've made about who I was, even when things get hard and were at the height of the conflict. I’ve found that some of the ways that I could do that in the courtroom also applied outside the courtroom. We are all our strongest advocates and the best person to protect and champion ourselves. If you can take the tools of a trial lawyer and apply them to life so that you can do those things, I think it would be helpful. I wrote the book to help people be able to do that.

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Karen Dukess, THE LAST BOOK PARTY

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Karen Dukess, THE LAST BOOK PARTY

Karen: I had this amazing, magical day in my twenties. I had gone to a party like the one that opens the book, this literary crowd, and met a guy, an artist. Soon after, we had this amazing day at the beach, the ocean. It was deserted and after a storm. A buoy from a lobster pod was quite close to shore. We danced around in waves. We pulled it in, very much like I described in the book. We took the lobsters. Being in our twenties, we didn't think that this is poaching. [laughter] We walked carrying the lobsters by the tail back to his house. We had dinner. Many years later, this guy died. Many years after that, I wanted to capture this day in writing because it was very magical at the time and became more special later. I had lost touch with him. I wanted to write about it.

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Madeleine Henry, BREATHE IN, CASH OUT

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Madeleine Henry, BREATHE IN, CASH OUT

Madeleine: With the publication of this book, I was afraid that some people would feel resentment toward me in some way that I'm writing about a world that they're still in. There's been a lot of support coming from my peers. I passed a couple of them on the street the other day. They said, “We’re so excited for you. We’re going to be at all the signings.” Every preorder matters. They're like, “We preordered it. What's my character’s name?” I realized that people want their stories told. It’s a big thing in life. You want to be heard. You want your experience shared. They feel like I'm representing the investment banking experience of our peers.

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Elissa Altman, MOTHERLAND: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOATHING, AND LONGING

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Elissa Altman, MOTHERLAND: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOATHING, AND LONGING

Elissa: I actually recently described Motherland to someone as a story of what would happen if Anna Wintour gave birth to the Susie character from Mrs. Maisel and the latter had to come back and be the caregiver for Anna. Please forgive me, Anna. I doubt that you will hear me saying these words, but you who knows? I don't know. Motherland is a memoir of moral obligation and certainly a memoir of love. It’s a story about what happens when we are called to make a decision about coming back to the fray, coming back into a relationship from which we have painstakingly extricated ourselves after a very long, arduous and difficult relationship. Do we do it? Do we not do it?

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Fiona Davis, THE CHELSEA GIRLS

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Fiona Davis, THE CHELSEA GIRLS

Fiona: Each of my books are situated around a landmark New York City building. The building for this one is of course the Chelsea Hotel. It’s about female friendship and the theater in New York City and politics, which is something new that I'm layering in. It takes place in 1950 from the point of view of an actress and a playwright, both women, who are trying to mount a play on Broadway during the McCarthy era. That was a very interesting time for actors in New York City.

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