In honor of Kamy Wicoff’s recent launch of Wishful Thinking, we are so pleased to dedicate this week’s Inspired By to the five books that have inspired her writing most.

Harry Potter series by JK Rowling

It was while reading the Harry Potter books with my oldest son that inspiration struck. I thought, if I could give a mom any power, what would it be? The answer came immediately: the ability to be in more than one place at a time! (Hermione’s Time-Turner accomplishes a similar feat, but I wanted mine to be powered by physics, not magic.)

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time by Brigid Schulte

I read this book when I was finishing up Wishful Thinking and was inspired, impressed, and enlightened by it. I also felt that Brigid and I had been inspired to write our books by similar concerns about the frenetic pace of life for modern parents. Our books are like fraternal twins, one fiction, one nonfiction. And also, she had to do journalism, while I just made stuff up.

 

Brigid Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding

I am the kind of woman who reads a lot of heavy literature (see number 4), but I loved this book, just like millions of other people around the world, for it’s honesty, wit, good-nature, and for its subtle social commentary on the pressures contemporary women of a certain age faced then, and still face now. (Hello diet journal!)

 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

My mentor and friend, the late Diane Middlebrook, was a huge admirer of Plath, and wrote a biography of her and her husband Ted Hughes called Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, A Marriage. (I was lucky enough to interview Diane about it shortly after it was published.) I’ve chosen The Bell Jar here because Diane—upon whom the physicist in my book, Dr. Diane Middlebrook, is based—believed Plath was powerful and crucial because she was a woman courageous enough to speak the truth about her life. Once, on a memorable walk Diane and I took together shortly before she died, she urged me to do the same in my own work. Wishful Thinking is not literary fiction on the order of The Bell Jar, but it is my telling of the truth of women’s lives, done in my own way.

 

Warped Passages: Unraveling The Mysteries Of The Universe’s Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall

I think I first got hooked on physics as kid watching the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan on PBS, but while I enjoyed my physics class with Mr. Potter at Clark High School in San Antonio, Texas, from that point forward I pursued it as a lay person, primarily through books like this. Lisa Randall is one of the preeminent physicists in the country and one of very few women at the top of the field; I used her as partial inspiration for Dr. Diane Sexton in my book and I love everything she writes.