Growing up in Greenwich, Connecticut during the 1980s, I was no stranger to the way wealth was portrayed in fiction and film. Spouses who hated each other, siblings who had stopped speaking, substance abuse problems, arranged nannies for second wives, status-symbol pets. Writers assigned to me in high school like Updike and Roth explored wealth and privilege with gloom and depression—if there was any fun, it was alcoholic or philandering. Usually, it was both.
It’s not that I didn’t appreciate this upper crust fiction, it just didn’t make room for the joy and absurdity I was seeing around. I was 13 when I attended a holiday party where the lady flooded the first floor of her mansion so that the children present could ice skate through the rooms. Another party in the same gated development saw the giraffes in the backyard during a fundraiser for some zoological concern.
After I graduated from high school, I started looking for writers who wrote about the rich in a funny way that still had some compassion. “Funny but not mean” became a north star: that’s how I wanted to write and be accepted one day, and something I was still thinking about when I wrote my new novel, Alan pulls back. Here’s a list – in the order I read them – of the novels I devoured as a youngster that inform the way I write today.
