Shelf Life: Caroline Kepnes

Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

Having gone from New York to L.A. to the PNW, Joe Goldberg heads back East, this time to Cambridge in For You and Only You (Random House), Caroline Kepnes’s fifth novel and fourth in the NYT-bestselling series about a homicidal bibliophile that was adapted into hit Netflix show You.

The Cape Cod-born, L.A.-based author is a former magazine journalist (Tiger Beat–which she chose over Conde Nast, Entertainment Weekly) and former E! Online gossip columnist who played blackjack instead of tailing Britney in Vegas as assigned. Before her show, she’d written for TV (7th Heaven, The Secret Life of the American Teenager), and has had her short stories published in numerous horror anthologies.

Kepnes won honorable mention and a typewriter in a Sassy short story contest; studied abnormal psychology for a summer during high school then created her own college major that combined psychology and creative writing; was inspired to move to NYC (where she lived in the 2000s) by The Last Days of Disco; and has been a Jeopardy! clue twice. Likes: songs on repeat and exclamation points, Knot’s Landing, Fluffernutters. Dislikes: summer camp. Good at: Going down rabbit holes. Bad at: penmanship. Some of her favorite writers below.

The book that:

…sealed a friendship:

I got a bound galley of #FashionVictim by Amina Akhtar. While reading and laughing hysterically, and dog-earing all the pages, I was like…Amina is my friend. She always has been, she just doesn’t know it yet.

…shaped my worldview:

It has to be What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry. The visuals and the attention to detail made me feel way less self-conscious about being a curious little child who wanted to snoop in everyone’s house.

…I’d give to a new graduate:

I’m gonna pull a Joe Goldberg and say Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. It mashes smart into stupid, silly into serious and it made me excited about the great big (perverted) world out there, in you, in all of us. Yay!

…broke my heart:

I could pick any book by Catriona Ward. Sundial slayed me. It’s a riveting page-turner, an autopsy of a family, a study in generational trauma, a meditation on science. You feel like the whole world is in there tugging at your insides.

…should be on every college syllabus:

The Street by Ann Petry. I read it in a class at Brown called “Black Women Writers.” Petry’s style is otherworldly, and this novel should also be mandatory reading in Best Writers 101.

…has the greatest ending:

The temperature rises slowly in Sarah Pinborough’s Insomnia. You’re locked in a house and the house is a woman and there is no escape, no sleep. You wonder how this will end and then…. I read the last few pages standing up, biting my nails.

…helped me become a better writer:

How do you know that you became a better writer? You don’t, but The Western Coast by Paula Fox transported me to Los Angeles in 1940. When a writer is that powerful and magical, it makes you want to find your own style.

I read in one sitting, it was that good:

I am a very repetitive person, so I have told many people about the way A Good Man by Ani Katz kept me glued to a chair for several hours even when the sun was on a mission to make me relocate. Not possible. Nope.

…fills me with hope:

Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater. Inhaling fresh, excellent, quotable, entertaining fiction from a debut novelist is a guaranteed way to breathe a little easier in our world. Red Widow by Alma Katsu. Inhaling fresh, excellent, quotable, entertaining fiction from an established writer is a guaranteed way to breathe a little easier in our world.

…describes a place I’d want to visit:

When I make it to Amsterdam, I will reread Spalding Gray’s Impossible Vacation on the plane and let his scratch-and-sniff-ish descriptions of what it’s like to fall apart in that city be my primer.

…has the best opening line:

An oldie: “So let me dish you this comedy about a family I knew when I was growing up.” (Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm.) A newbie: “There’s a time and a place for erect nipples, but the back of a Seattle police car definitely isn’t it.” (Jennifer Hillier’s Things We Do in the Dark.)

…I’ve re-read the most:

An ideal feast: Rewatch a few episodes of The Middle for the 98,976th time and chase ‘em with yet another visit to Cormac McCarthy’s taut, haunting Child of God.

…made me laugh out loud:

You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir by Parker Posey. There’s a famous (to me) scene in Waiting for Guffman where Posey’s character is barbecuing a single chicken wing and smoking a cigarette, noting that she’ll “always have a place at the Dairy Queen.” This memoir feels like that scene. Equal parts out there wackadoodle and no holds barred, grounded fucking fun.