T.I.M. Wirkus: Creating mystery and magic across genres

I’m a stay-at-home parent and fiction writer.

I’m re-reading Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which is such a sad and funny and insightful novel, and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, a book about astrophysics which is bending my brain.

Growing up, I was a big fan of the middle-grade fiction of Daniel Pinkwater. If you haven’t read him, I’d describe his books as Thomas Pynchon for tweens: lots of zany character names, elaborate conspiracies, and general absurdity. My favorite growing up was Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy from Mars, about, among other things, two friends who learn to travel between dimensions using their minds. (Also, I recently heard that Benny Safdie is directing an adaptation of one of Pinkwater’s books—Lizard Music—so hopefully that will introduce him to a new generation of readers).

A paleontologist, I think, and then later, inspired by the original Mission: Impossible tv series, a spy.

My school-aged self would be baffled beyond comprehension by me and the world I occupy.

Any birthday is a good occasion for a laugh, so I’d gift myself a Samantha Irby essay collection, any one of them, really—can’t go wrong.

When we started dating, my now-spouse introduced me to the delightful romantic suspense novels of Mary Stewart, and so whenever I read one—This Rough Magic and My Brother Michael are two favorites—I’m reminded of summer and the beginnings of a long romance.

Probably Moby-Dick because nobody believes that it’s actually a great read, so they don’t read it, and I keep recommending it, and they keep not reading it, and on and on.

I like both, but probably end up reading more fiction than non-fiction. Format-wise, I like audiobooks for when I’m running errands or doing chores, an e-reader for when I wake up in the middle of the night and don’t want to turn on any lights, and physical books for all the other times. I do love a handsome paperback.

I was totally drawn in by Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex trilogy, which follows a wide cast of characters in mid-2010s Paris who are pursuing a mythical videocassette recorded by a recently deceased rock star. It was such an enjoyable, immersive reading experience that ticked so many of my boxes: complex, memorable characters; lives that intersect in unexpected ways; a search for enlightenment; good jokes.

Oof, that’s a tough one. Maybe Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, to bring a little cheer into your day. Also, the book itself is very small and cute.

I’m not sure any one book has had an outsized influence on my life overall, but if we’re talking about my professional life, then the answer is the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. His synthesis of the fantastical and the logical captivated me as a young writer and I treated his stories as an advanced seminar in what fiction can do.

I used to have a pretty fixed personal canon of favorites, but these days my taste feels much more fluid. At the moment, I’d say the books most shaping/reflecting what I like are Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, The Case for Rage by Myisha Cherry, The Husbands by Holly Gramazio, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, Iris Murdoch’s messier later novels, Women’s Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery, The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson, anything by Jane Austen, and Recollections of My Life as a Woman by Diane di Prima.

A Bad Deal in Mormon Land is a historical crime novel/comedy of manners about—in part—a fraudulent spirit medium who gets hired in 1908 by an excommunicated Mormon apostle to summon the ghost of Joseph Smith to give his blessing to the former apostle’s breakaway sect. The novel also follows a disillusioned wife of the polygamous apostle, a beautiful private detective with a grudge, a ruthless copper magnate, a ne’er-do-well henchman of the ex-apostle, a group of trans vaudevillians, and a beleaguered labor leader.

Peter Ustinov called his memoir Dear Me, and I can’t think of a better title for an autobiography than that.