This week’s Inspired By is dedicated to the author of Uncovered, Leah Lax. Here, she shares the top five books and authors that have inspired her as an author.

Since I was living in a homogeneous (fundamentalist) community when I was first trying to write, where many people will posture a stock character that exhibits no conflict, it’s little wonder to look back and realize that my earliest influences were writers who were masters of varied nuanced characters deeply grounded in the larger world. 

Rosellen Brown

I met Brown when her book was on the NYT bestseller list, while I was living in a world that frowned on secular literature. Before and After was the first novel I read as an adult, although I had once been a kid who lived with my nose in a book. I was astonished by Brown’s characterizations and felt that, as a writer, she had to kind of transform herself from one to the next to get inside their skin–and had managed to do so. I imagined her some kind of chameleon, thought she could x-ray a soul. 

Alice Munro

After I contacted Brown in secret and told her I was trying to write, Brown directed me first to Munro’s work–an utterly subversive recommendation to a covered woman. I began with Lives of Girls and Women. Munro understands being human as being defined by contradiction. Every time one of her characters does something that you might think typifies them, that character then turns and does something you’d never expect, something “out of character,” and somehow becomes more human by doing so. Most important, their conflicts are rarely resolved. They survive, and age, and move on.

Rita Dove

Her poetry, with its brash open love, rocked my world of modesty and euphemism and denial. In one of her poems in Mother Love, mother and young daughter sit on the floor naked, their open legs forming a diamond, the daughter discovering what she will become, their feet grounded in one another. Can you ever forget that image?

Virginia Woolfe

After I started university in Creative Writing, I read Mrs. Dalloway eight times. My other favorites of hers, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, which made me laugh out loud. I loved the careful parsing of the stream that runs through our brains, her deep awareness of the wounds the world inflicts, the elegance of her prose. If I were disciplined, I’d re-read Mrs. Dalloway once a year for the rest of my life. Formative.

Jose Saramago (Blindness is my favorite of his)

He writes page-long sentences that are really strings of phrases separated by commas, but once I got into the rhythm I found it intimate and freeing, like overhearing a private monologue or relaxing for a while inside his brain, yet it wasn’t airless or claustrophobic because, first, his characters are unassuming hardworking people in the world and we see that, and, second but most important, the inexorable wheels of society, the world around the character, is so very present–and could soon steamroll the character. I resisted, but this changed both my sense of the world of my characters and changed my sentence structure, just crept in and I stopped trying to stop it.