8 Favorites on Jennifer Weiner’s Bookshelf

I know it’s a total cliché to read a book and say you want to be friends with the author, but I want to be friends with Tina Fey (and I really think it could happen!). The tale of a suburban girl finding her voice and making her way in the still-entirely-too-male world of comedy felt so specific and true . . . and her stories about her husband and her daughters are total #relationshipgoals.

Fat people didn’t ask to be fat. My personal theory is that we’re just somehow hungrier than everyone else; that we can no more let a bucket of fried chicken go uneaten than an alcoholic can leave wine in the bottle. Frank Bruni’s description of his war with his appetite—along with his mouthwatering recountings of the meals his mother served, and the ones he ate as the “Times’s” food critic—had the unique effect of making both my mouth and my eyes water.

You have to be careful about what you read when you’re writing, or you can end up in total despair, thinking, “This is what I wanted to say, only she got there first and said it better.” But here’s the thing—there can never be too many stories about growing up as a big girl in a world that wants its women small. And Lindy’s defense of Ursula the Sea Witch as a role model gives me life, as the kids say.

Isadora Wing. Bright, blond, brash, brilliant, a frustrated poet in a sexually unfulfilling marriage who goes to Vienna, meets a man, climbs in his car, and tries to figure out where she’s going and where she's been. Isadora gave birth to a million chick-lit heroines and made an equal number of college girls dream about the adventures they, too, could have.

This book, with its iconic paperback cover (a woman facedown, possibly falling, maybe pounding at the floor) was in every college dorm bookshelf in the late 1980s/early 1990s. If you wanted to be a writer, you read Mary Gaitskill’s pitch-black, edgy, creepy tales about men and women behaving badly, and you wondered if this was the real world, or just an especially dark version of it.

Really, I could put any book by JK here—I have read her entire oeuvre—but SCRUPLES was the book that stole my heart. An overweight, awkward, ostracized ugly duckling who sheds her weight, sheds her billionaire husband, finds her power, and wants to run the world? Billy Hunnewell Ikehorn Orsini Elliott 4ever.

I found this in my mother’s bookshelf when I was twelve. It was a revelation—writers could talk this way? About this stuff? They can publish books about breasts, and bake-offs, and vaginal deodorant? I loved everything about it—the specificity of Nora’s voice, intimate and New York and Jewish, the unflinchingly female topics, the implicit insistence that these were stories that mattered.

Again, I’ve read it all, but this book had one of the most relatable narrators I can remember. Jewish, smart, and ambitious, unhappy family, big, big love... and a happy ending that unravels and has to be won all over again. A great big happy feast of a book that I put into as many people’s hands as I can.