Madame Olenska leaves her marriage and returns to New York. She’s rejected by her old society friends and struggles to find her place. She rekindles an old flame and tries to talk herself into believing it isn’t wrong. Her story was part of my inspiration for Serena van der Woodsen in GOSSIP GIRL, but there’s so much more that inspires me here. Wharton does that thing where we hear the character think one thing and say another. She’s wonderfully omniscient, in cahoots with the reader. And yet she has a deep, soulful empathy and love for her heroine and her foes. There’s an elegance to Wharton’s New York and her well-traveled, well-heeled New Yorkers that is never snooty. It’s genuine, and so romantic: “The worst of it is that I want to kiss you and I can’t.”

The ducks and the carousel in Central Park. Walking aimlessly around the city when everyone else is in school. Insecure, anxious, romantic, existentialist, declarative Holden Caulfield. Just rereading the fiercely loving way he describes his little sister—“I mean if you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what the hell you’re talking about,” gets me every time. I could never have written Dan in GOSSIP GIRL without Holden Caulfield. There’s a little bit of him in every one of my male protagonists.

All of my five half-siblings had gone to boarding school, so my father thought I ought to go too. I remember my Phillips Exeter interview distinctly. The interviewer was a young, severe woman who wore a kilt. When she asked me about a favorite book I’d read recently I said confidently, “THE BELL JAR, by Sylvia Plath.” The interviewer was taken aback. “But she killed herself.” The interview spiraled downward from there, and I never went to boarding school. Suicide is not what’s memorable to me about THE BELL JAR. It’s a witty, apt chronicle of the anxieties of a hyperintelligent college-age woman trying (and failing) to find herself in the city. No one writes like Plath. Her word choices startle you awake. I don’t care what that Exeter interviewer thought all those years ago. THE BELL JAR is a crucial chronicle of young womanhood.

Reading Tom Wolfe made me a more daring writer—with language and dialogue and sentence structure, and with iconography, particularly the iconography of the city. This book is bold and funny and gets a particular milieu at a particular time in New York just exactly right. It’s a true social satire. I knew I wanted to do something similar but also very different. Wolfe’s portrayal of New York society is harshly hilarious. He doesn’t seem to care if his rich people are unlikeable. I do laugh at my rich New Yorkers, but I laugh with them and I love them too.

Cocktails in Grand Central Station and cigarettes on rainy sidewalks. Glowing apartment windows and doormen hailing taxis. I was first introduced to Cheever’s short stories in my tenth grade English class at Nightingale Bamford, taught by Christine Schutt, a wonderful writer and a great teacher. Reading Cheever’s stories, I learned for the first time the importance of setting and specificity. There’s much in his stories that I recognized from having grown up in the city and from having an older father of his generation. From Cheever I learned to pay attention to character details. “He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve.” And I learned that heartbreaking things are happening to the businessman in the fancy trench coat that you see every day on the train.

THE LONELY DOLL was by far my favorite book as a child. It’s since been knocked off many bookshelves for being inappropriate for children, and maybe it is, but that doesn’t make it any less important to me. Wright’s photographs of Edith the doll and the two stuffed bears exploring the city and the interior of their apartment are incredibly, painstakingly, beautiful. I’ve always wanted a vanity like the one where Edith styles her hair and tries on jewelry and lipstick, knowing she’s going to get into trouble. I had a vivid imagination as a child and I was the youngest, the only girl. Edith was my soul sister. Whenever I open this book, I get a little tearful. I suppose it’s the inspiration for a theme explored in all my books, that someone who can appear so flawless—like Edith, the beautiful doll—is actually messy and complex and very human.

My all-time favorite book, the book I return to again and again. I even had my father read from it at my wedding. It’s exquisite and tragic and optimistically pessimistic. It’s a love story and a murder mystery, social commentary and a history lesson, all rolled into one. I find myself stopping to reread a sentence just for the pleasure of it. Gatsby’s devotion to impressing Daisy and Nick’s observations as a person new to the party—and new to the city and its wealthy suburbs—have informed everything I write. When I’m working on an ending, I always reread Fitzgerald’s inimitable last line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

COBBLE HILL is a deliciously irresistible novel chronicling a year in the life of four families in an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood as they seek purpose, community, and meaningful relationships—until one unforgettable night at a raucous neighborhood party knocks them to their senses.

Smart, sophisticated, yet surprisingly tender, COBBLE HILL is highly entertaining portrait of contemporary family life and the colorful characters who call Brooklyn home.