Why am I passionate about this?

I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.  


I wrote

I Meant It Once

By Kate Doyle,

Book cover of I Meant It Once

What is my book about?

With this sharp and witty debut, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women…

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The books I picked & why

Book cover of Days of Distraction

Kate Doyle Why did I love this book?

The narrator of Chang’s debut novel keeps referencing this project she’s working on, and it just might be the book we’re reading.

The novel brilliantly messes around in the gray area between life and art, author and narrator, truth and fiction—as our narrator, adrift in a new town after a cross-country move, writes as a way to make sense of where she’s been and where she’s going. 

By Alexandra Chang,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Days of Distraction as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Startlingly original and deeply moving.... Chang here establishes herself as one of the most important of the new generation of American writers.”   — George Saunders

A Recommended Book From
Buzzfeed * TIME * USA Today * NPR * Vanity Fair * The Washington Post * New York Magazine * O, the Oprah Magazine * Parade * Wired * Electric Literature * The Millions * San Antonio Express-News * Domino * Kirkus

A wry, tender portrait of a young woman—finally free to decide her own path, but unsure if she knows herself well enough to choose wisely—from a captivating new literary…


Book cover of The Cost of Living

Kate Doyle Why did I love this book?

This brief and atmospheric account of a year Levy left her marriage and began sorting out how to live a different life is one I return to again and again.

I can’t overstate my affection for the scene in which, traveling through London on her beloved electric bike with groceries in tow, Levy loses a raw whole chicken under the wheels of a passing car. Talk about someone who can turn even life’s most mundane frustrations into a totally transcendent piece of writing. 

By Deborah Levy,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Cost of Living as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY
WINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020

Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography'.

'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer
_________________________________

'Life falls apart.
We try to get a grip and hold it together.
And then we realise we don't want to hold it together . . .'

The final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography', Real…


Book cover of The Folded Clock: A Diary

Kate Doyle Why did I love this book?

I don’t set much store by orderly chronology, in life or writing—as might be clear from my book, where old memories live vividly alongside the present moment!

More interesting to me is how memory accumulates and morphs over time, and how stories live in our minds. Needless to say I adore Julavits’s non-chronological diary The Folded Clock (and what a title)! In gorgeously detailed individual sections, she immerses us in her life without regard for the precise sequence of events. We’re left with a beautiful jumble, which is surely truer than how life is anyway. 

By Heidi Julavits,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Folded Clock as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A New York Times Notable Book

Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they “revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life—now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with…


Book cover of Optic Nerve

Kate Doyle Why did I love this book?

I love a book that defies genre—and this one is sort of a short story collection, sort of a novel, sort of criticism, sort of autofiction.

In each story, Gainza’s art critic narrator considers an anecdote from her own past in relation to a piece of art she’s studied. Gradually, art and life accumulate into the life story, from many angles, of this woman who might also be the author, and the stories and passions that compose who she is. 

By Maria Gainza, Thomas Bunstead (translator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Optic Nerve as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A highly original, piercingly beautiful work, full of beautiful shocks... I felt like a door had been kicked open in my brain' Johanna Thomas-Corr, Observer

A woman searches Buenos Aires for the paintings that are her inspiration and her refuge. Her life -- she is a young mother with a complicated family -- is sometimes overwhelming. But among the canvases, often little-known works in quiet rooms, she finds clarity and a sense of who she is . . .

'I was reminded of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, enfolded in tender and exuberant personal narratives'
Claire-Louise Bennett

'This woman-guide, who…


Book cover of Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

Kate Doyle Why did I love this book?

I’ll end with a book that started it all for me!

I still remember, in the year 2010, reaching the end of the essay "Goodbye to All That" where the date of publication is noted—1967—and how startled I was to realize something that feels so contemporary and alive had been written decades earlier. As in so much of her work, in this collection Didion offers vivid details from her life and brings her extraordinary powers of analysis to understanding their meaning.

As she once put it herself—in another essay, "Why I Write"—"Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.”

By Joan Didion,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked Slouching Towards Bethlehem as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Joan Didion's savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were

In her non-fiction work, Joan Didion not only describes the subject at hand - her younger self loving and leaving New York, the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion…


Explore my book 😀

I Meant It Once

By Kate Doyle,

Book cover of I Meant It Once

What is my book about?

With this sharp and witty debut, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships—with friends, roommates, siblings—while trying to move forward into an uncertain future.

In “That Is Shocking,” a college student relates a darkly funny story of romantic humiliation, one that skirts the parallel story of a friend she betrayed. In others, young women long for friends who have moved away, or moved on. In “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote” and other linked stories about siblings Helen, Evan, and Grace, their years of inside jokes and brutal tensions simmer over as the three spend a holiday season in an amusing whirl of rivalry and mutual attachment, and a generational gulf widens between them and their parents.

You might also like...

Christmas Actually

By Lisa Darcy,

Book cover of Christmas Actually

Lisa Darcy Author Of The Pact

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Author Cat lover Traveler Reader Amateur tennis player Foodie

Lisa's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

Every picture tells a story, but it’s not always the one we expect or remember. Christmas Actually is a festive drama about family and forgiveness and a snapshot of modern family life, addressing Instagram to motherhood and everything in between.

Why Christmas? My publisher wanted my new novel to have a festive theme, specifically set in Australia–sun, surf, sunburn, and prawns. Christmas in Australia is very different from Christmas in the UK, USA, and Canada. We typically wear shorts and t-shirts, eat salad and seafood for Christmas lunch, and play beach cricket in the afternoon. Despite the season, conflicts, secrets,…

Christmas Actually

By Lisa Darcy,

What is this book about?

Time spent with family can be challenging, especially at Christmas actually…

Kate Cavendish is stuck in a rut. That is until a former colleague contacts her and offers her a chance to fulfil her lifelong dream of becoming a successful photographer.

With her focus pulled in all directions by her children, her pregnant sister, her newly-dating mother, and the niggling worry that her husband might be having an affair, Kate is filled with self-doubt.

Then as the countdown to Christmas begins, and memories of her own childhood resurface, Kate’s anxiety deepens – both personally and professionally. Can she move on…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in social class, authors, and California?

Social Class 98 books
Authors 198 books
California 397 books