Influenced Writers

I wrote about Writers Under the Influence, a section of Amazon with new writers' essays on who influenced them. I found the New York Times did something like that 20 years ago and recently. Of the under-forty fiction writers queried, I recognized only one name, Susan Choi, and only a few of the authors listed as "the writer or writers who had most influenced their work", except for Zadie Smith's classics. I'm not sure what this says about my own reading, but I learned from the article, because the Times also asked these younger writers to explain how their work was influenced. I liked what Nell Freudenberger said: We start to write by reading, admiring and subconsciously imitating what we admire. Most eloquent is J.T. LeRoy's ode to Breece D'J Pancake. This sounds similar to my uneasiness with Sylvia Plath's poetry: The disconnection and hopelessness in Pancake's stories were too familiar. I felt too close to their possibilities, to how he ended his life, committing suicide in 1979 -- the year before I was born -- at the age of 26.

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