This week’s Inspired By is dedicated to Camille Pagán, author of Life and Other Near-Death Experiences. Here, she shares the five books that have inspired her most as a writer.

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is the novel that made me want to become a writer. I was 21 and had just graduated from college, and was living in a crappy little sublet in New York for six weeks, counting the days until I would move to Cambridge and attend the Radcliffe Publishing Course, and then get on with real life—or so I thought at the time. Every night I’d come home from working at Seventeen, where I was interning, and pick up White Teeth; and every night, I was gobsmacked by Smith’s brilliance yet again. Yet instead of being completely intimidated, I was able to admit to myself, Yeah, I want to write fiction, too.

In my twenties, after despairing of my instinct to flee a relationship that was so good for me I didn’t know how to handle it, I read Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love twice in a row, then went around recommending it like a door-to-door evangelist offering free copies of the Bible. This novel, which is really a series of intertwined stories about people in Ann Arbor—which happens to be the city I live in now, and where I attended school—is like comfort food for the soul.

While a dear friend of mine was dying of cancer, I dove back into one of my favorites, Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, a story that illustrates, among other things, the way humans are interconnected with nature and every living thing. It’s that rare novel that moves you through grief.

If I were stranded on an island and only had one book to read, I’d want it to be Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. A tale of two couples that become lifelong friends, this book is a gorgeous reflection on love, life, and what makes us the people who we are.

Every book list should include a new discovery. Most recently, I read and absolutely loved Lauren Fox’s Days of Awe. It’s a gorgeous, smart, and funny novel about a woman who loses her closest friend even as her marriage is falling apart, and discovers that there was much about her friend’s life that she didn’t know. And that’s the thing—we can never really, truly know everything about even the people who are closest to us. It had me thinking for weeks afterward.