Dinner for 6: The Literary Ladies I Want Sitting at My Table

I have a pretty reliable barometer of how busy I am: how high the partially read stack of books on my bedside table has grown. I’m at five-high right now, which is somewhere between “more lazy than busy” and “busy as all get out.”

In the stack, I see things I already know about myself — I like women authors, and I like nonfiction. And if authors are really just people you’d like to spend time with, I also see a pretty good proxy for the ultimate dinner party. Here’s who I’m inviting.

Amy Poehler (Yes Please)
The thing I love most about Amy Poehler isn’t from “Saturday Night Live” or “Parks and Recreation.” Back in 2011, when I was hugely pregnant with baby #2, she was being honored at a Time 100 event. When it came time for her to speak, she thanked not Lorne Michaels or her agent, but her nannies.

“I have thought very hard and long about what has influenced me over the past couple of years… And it was the women who helped me take care of my children. It is Jackie Johnson from Trinidad and it is Dawa Chodon from Tibet, who come to my house and help me raise my children… [O]n behalf of every sister and mother and person who stands in your kitchen and helps you love your child, I say thank you and I celebrate you tonight.”

I know well the deep, awkward gratitude of having someone help me love my child, and it was one of the best, most authentic acceptance speeches I’ve ever heard. So while I haven’t yet cracked the spine of Yes Please, I cannot wait to laugh and revel in the kick-ass attitude of someone who wrote, “Saying ‘yes’ doesn’t mean I don’t know how to say ‘no’ and saying ‘please’ doesn’t mean I am waiting for permission.” 

Sheila Heti (Women in Clothes)
Back in my post-grad, I-want-to-be-a-writer days, I published an essay in a tiny review that nobody read. It was called “The Secret Language of My Wardrobe” and it was about the memories attached to various pieces of clothing hanging in my closet, how each skirt or dress or faux leopard jacket connected me to different people, different times, all written from an overly nostalgic, navel-gazing POV.

I’d be mortified if Sheila Heti ever read that essay, but, as one of the forces behind Women in Clothes, I love her approach to the question of why we wear what we wear, and what it means to us. Plus the spread (by co-editor and artist Leanne Shapton) of Zosia Mamet doing fashion photography poses is just genius.

Meghan Daum (The Unspeakable)
I devoured Daum’s essay, “My Misspent Youth,” back when I was busy misspending my youth in Brooklyn. I saw myself in a lot of those sentences — I was never interested in being rich. I just wanted to live in a place with oak floors — and fantasized myself into the parts about her blossoming writing career while reluctantly acknowledging my own gaping hole of debt borne of what I made minus what I spent. When a friend departed New York for South Dakota, I sent her the essay — not via email, but the old-school way: I photocopied it on the sly at the horrid temp job I worked while trying to freelance. It was my way of saying, “It’s all going to be okay.”

More recently, I texted a child-free friend the link to her last New Yorker essay, “Difference Maker,” my way of saying, perhaps not that all was going to be okay, but that life is complicated and here’s someone who gets that. I feel that way about so much of Daum’s writing — including The Unspeakable, which I’m 43 pages into — so letting her say it for me just seems more direct.

Susan Sontag (As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh)
There was the fascinating HBO documentary, of course. But even before that, a friend I hadn’t seen in ages was telling me how she annotated this particular collection of Sontag’s personal writing and how it reminded her to document her own thoughts about the world. And before that, I was talking to someone about reading On Photography for the first time in college. To collect photos is to collect the world. What would she have said about the Instagram Age? It’s not in these journal entries, but I’m dying to find out what is.

Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things)
After a desperate, tearful phone call, from deep in my time of need, a friend mailed me this book — and it delivered. Getting lost in someone else’s problems and the balm of Strayed’s writing, was the perfect way to escape my own problems while also somehow dealing with them at the same time. I am not the first to say she’s like the friend you wish you always had. I’ve read this cover to cover already, but I always go back for more.

Including me, that’s dinner for six. If there’s room for eight, maybe Tina Fey (Bossy Pants) and Lena Dunham (Not That Kind of Girl) can make it. And do you think Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist) is free?