Books that changed how I write

People always ask who my influences are, and I never know how to answer without sounding like I'm performing good taste. So here's the honest list, in roughly the order I encountered them.

1. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

This book taught me that you can write an entire novel about a difficult person and make the reader love them anyway. Olive is mean sometimes. She's blunt in ways that wound people. And somehow by the end you feel like you understand her completely. Strout does this thing where she lets you see Olive through other people's eyes before you get inside Olive's head, so by the time you're with her, you've already built up sympathy without realizing it.

I stole that technique for Small Mercies. I'm not sure I pulled it off as well as she did.

2. Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

This is the book that gave me permission to break things apart. Before I read it, I thought novels had to move in a straight line. Offill's book is fragments. Little observations, memories, facts from science journals, all assembled into something that somehow feels more true than a traditional narrative.

"The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out."

That line destroyed me. The whole book is like that. Tiny sentences that carry more weight than they should.

3. The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

I've read this three times and I still don't fully understand how she does what she does with sentences. They operate on two levels at once. You read a paragraph about someone pouring tea and realize she's also told you everything about their marriage.

The one I'm trying to unlearn

I owe a lot to Raymond Carver, who I read too much of in my twenties. You can see it in Maps of the Interior, my first book. That pared-down, say-less-than-you-mean style. I've been trying to unlearn it ever since, with mixed results. The problem with minimalism is that once it's in your bones, it's hard to let yourself write a long sentence without hearing a voice in your head saying cut it.

Some other books I come back to, in no particular order:

• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
• The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (partly because it's about a dog, and I'm weak)