The best novels about writers and how being a writer changes their lives

Little Women published in 1868 two years before Charles Dickens died was the first novel I read where one of the characters was a writer. Alcott makes Jo March brash and opinionated which is not the usual way writers are portrayed. But Alcott also makes her freedom-loving and this endears the reader to her though sometimes her behavior and the reasons for what she does can baffle. The cool thing about Little Women is that it shows how a writer stands out and how they can change the world around them. Jo March becomes famous and successful and just again in 2019 a movie was made of Little Women to prove its enduring attraction and relevance. 

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man published in 1912 might be the best title about being an artist that there is. In the novel we follow the intellectual awakenings of a young man in Dublin, Stephen Dedalus, as he struggles with feelings of lust, thoughts of religion, and his sense of identity. Every writer should read this short, semi- autobiographical novel since Joyce dramatizes the last century’s ideas of what it means to be an artist no matter your gender or religion. Stephen has a lot to deal with. Will he fly too close to the sun, crash and burn? Does he truly believe in his aesthetic philosophy?  Where does he belong in the artist’s universe? His best friend wants him to conform and when this same friend steals away the love of Stephen’s young life, he knows he must leave his home and all he is familiar with if he is to survive as an artist.

This book is also a semi-autobiographical and painful exploration of a writer’s addiction to alcohol.  It is the story of a talented writer, Don Birnam. Birnam lives in a rundown neighborhood in Manhattan and is praised for his realism in his writing but he drinks to numb himself to his struggle with his homosexual feelings. The novel follows him on a five-day binge as he uses all kinds of ingenuity to get a bottle of rye to sustain him. He contemplates murdering his selfless, dedicated girlfriend’s maid to get a key to a liquor cabinet. He bangs his head in frustration and winds up in an ‘alcoholic ward.’ Enjoying quoting Shakespeare and confident as a writer, his worst enemy is not a blank page but the need to drink. It was adapted into a brilliant film.

Jack Torrance is struggling with his creativity and his alcohol consumption and when he takes his family to the Overland Hotel he becomes possessed by the hotel! Spending a winter in isolation, his imagination runs rampant. I recommend the novel because it shows a writer who is deep in agony, stressed about being dried up, and then finds himself in such isolation his mind hooks into the dark, disturbing nightmare of murder and mayhem. Though Stephen King at first disliked the Stanley Kubrick film, he is slowly changing his mind. For me, the novel shows what could happen to a writer when they are utterly secluded. I have never been one of those writers who wants to rent a cottage in the woods and write.  I like writing in big cities never too far from a restaurant, a party, a human face.    

My Brilliant Friend is my favorite novel of the last decade. Elena and Lila are childhood friends in working-class Naples, Italy in the 1950s. When Lila turns down an offer to take a writing class it is Elena who takes it and realizes her vocation. On this theme alone the author captures how Elena’s life changes forever once her first book is published. The author captures how her working-class family, neighbors, and friends, including Lila, look at her differently. She is catapulted into a world she knows nothing about and struggles with her newfound fame and new identity. Who is the brilliant friend of the title you ask as you devour all four books? The novel wonderfully captures how becoming a writer forces those around you to see you differently, confusing them and making you truly wonder if you are as special as all that. PS The TV series based on the novel on HBO is outstanding or should I say brilliant.