What have you been reading / do you plan to read during your debut book tour? The choices the author made in that book, particularly with regard to point of view, were perfect. That book changed how I saw mental illness. So many! But if I have to pick one it would be Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. What is a book you’ve read that you thought, Damn, I wish that was mine? I hoped to achieve a fraction of what he achieved in that story. The Roth story is so funny and so powerful. I reread the wonderful Philip Roth story “The Conversion of the Jews” while I was writing the title story in We Love Anderson Cooper. In my forties, I tried to read it again, and it didn’t speak to me at all.Īre there any books that you read while writing your debut that helped shape the direction you took your own book? I thought it was the key to enlightenment.

In my mid-to-late teens, I fell in love with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. What about the opposite way? One you loved in your teens, but realized you didn’t love it so much later on? I tried to read it recently and failed again. I couldn’t get through Moby-Dick in high school. Moving to your school years: what book did you read in high school and hated (or skipped reading at all) that you learned you loved later in life?

People benefit by reading books that make them think and laugh. I’d like anyone to read them, children or adults. Would you want any children in your life (yours or relatives’) to read those too? Or what’s your philosophy on what children read? I saw the world I grew up in reflected in those books, and they captured some of the conflicts I had with that world. What writer doesn’t identify with Jo? And a bit older still, Chaim Potok’s books, My Name Is Asher Lev, The Chosen, and The Promise. When I was a little older, the Little Women books by Louisa May Alcott. I had an absent father, too, and was very fond of candy. The Pippi Longstocking books by Astrid Lindgren. Is there a book or series that, when you think back, helped define your childhood?

Maizes answered Debutiful‘s “A Life of Books” questionnaire. From a therapist’s couch to a boys Bar Mitzvah, we are welcomed in to relatable scenarios that will make readers feel connected.īelow, R.L. The stories have the same heart, but range in a deliciously diverse cast of characters. We Love Anderson Cooper brings outsiders into a warm embrace. Maizes offers stories filled with quirky wit that explore the small tender moments of our lives.

We Love Anderson Cooper by R.L. Maizes