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Marianne Power is a freelance journalist and writer who lives in London. Her first book, Help Me!: One Woman's Quest to Find Out If Self-Help Really Can Change Your Life, was recently published by Grove Atlantic.
On your nightstand now:
Crudo by Olivia Laing, Don't Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin and Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Pretty typical stuff for a girl in England: The Famous Five, Roald Dahl, Little Women. Then as the moody teen years started, I moved on to all the Judy Blume books, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
Your top five authors:
Willy Vlautin's characters break my heart. David Sedaris makes me laugh with every sentence. Dolly Alderton is a young British journalist and writer whose writing is so funny and real I am often overcome with jealousy while reading her. Jealousy also strikes with Sally Rooney. I also admire Anne Lamott's honesty--Bird by Bird was a help in the writing process.
Book you've faked reading:
Much of Shakespeare.
Books you're an evangelist for:
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, A Little Life (I'm still not over it) and all of Willy Vlautin.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends. The book was even better than the cover and I enjoyed her next book, Normal People, even more than the first. Such talent.
Book you hid from your parents:
Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews and also the copy of The Thorn Birds that I nicked from the bookshelves in the living room and took to my room to read the naughty bits.
Book that changed your life:
I read Josephine Hart's Damage while on my first holiday without my family when I was 18. I was on a sun-lounger by the pool of the apartments in Corfu and it was like a punch to the guts. It was the first book that made me think "I want to be a writer."
Favorite line from a book:
Two of Samuel Beckett's lines were daily companions as I wrote this book: "Fail again, fail better" and "I can't go on, I'll go on..."
Five books you'll never part with:
I find it hard to throw away any book I enjoyed, but I'm most sentimental about books I read as a child. I'll never part with my school copy of Wuthering Heights which is annotated with color-coded scribbles, ditto my first copies of Macbeth and To the Lighthouse. Mum gave me a hardback of the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald when I was a teenager, and holding it reminds of being in my bedroom when I was that age, reading until the small hours. I was a much better reader before the Internet. Anyway, what can you do? More recently, on my self-help adventure, I fell in love with the weirdly written The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. It's fallen in the bath, has the scribbles of a madwoman in the margin and part of the back cover is ripped, but it has become my bible and just holding it makes me feel calmer.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
A Little Life.