Amanda Parrish Morgan was recently named the interim executive director of the Westport Writers Workshop, a hub for writers and authors in Westport (and beyond) to hone their craft. Amanda is a celebrated author herself—her book Stroller was heralded by The New Yorker, noting that “the central strength of the book is not comprehensiveness but the way the stroller, and Morgan’s experience of her own strollering years, become an omnidirectional magnet, pulling disparate material into friendly proximity.”
Amanda is also an expert at recommending books— she has written roundups of favorites for outlets like The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. And, since we are lucky enough to have her right here in our own backyard, Westport Lifestyle asked Amanda to suggest six of her favorite summer reads. While these books are perfect for days spent at Compo, they aren't your typical "beach reads." From an essay collection by an esteemed TV writer to a nostalgic novel about the bygone days of 1990s summers, there's something on her list for everyone.
1. Heidi Julavits’s Directions to Myself is a meditation on navigating life between Manhattan, where Julavits teaches, and Maine, where she and her family spend their summers. It’s a book deeply rooted in place and in the particular, sublime and mundane moments that make up our lives and one of the most probing reflections on raising children as they grow older and inherently more separate from their parents.
2. The Road to Tender Hearts - I loved Annie Hartnett’s quirky novel Unlikely Animals, which is a loose retelling of Our Town featuring a chorus from the town cemetery, and I love a road trip novel (perfect for summer!), so I ordered The Road to Tender Hearts months ahead of its publication date. It’s about a quirky cast of characters stuck in a car together in a way that reminds me of the film Little Miss Sunshine.
3. Kevin Wilson’s Now is Not the Time to Panic is set mostly over the course of a single early '90s suburban summer. Teenagers Frankie and Zeke form an unlikely friendship and the by turns hilarious and sincere novel is brilliant at evoking that particular ennui of unstructured summer days in an age before cell phones and the way the intensity of our earliest friendships shape us into adulthood.
4. Emma Cline’s novel The Guest follows a vaguely sinister yet threatened young woman as she grifts and wanders through the Hamptons. It’s a dark book with the tension that’s present from the novel’s opening and is not necessarily resolved on its final pages; this, along with the novel’s summer setting makes reading it feel like waiting for a thunderstorm to break during an oppressive heatwave.
5. Sam Irby’s essay collections are all hilarious. A writer for Hulu’s Shrill and the HBO reboot of Sex and the City, she’s mercilessly self-depricating and brilliant in the specificity of her observations, but the humor in her writing is also fundamentally forgiving and kind. Her first book, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is a great place to start.
6. The plot of Irish writer Sally Rooney’s Normal People is so propulsive that it’s easy to overlook the quality of the writing at the sentence level. Over the course of the summer day to tear through this novel years ago, I was in the throes of raising young kids and reading time was hard to come by; I carried it around the house, reading while I folded laundry, did dishes, or waited for camp pickup.
Amanda Parrish Morgan is the author of Stroller (Bloomsbury), which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022. Amanda’s writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Wired, LitHub, Guernica, n+1, The American Scholar, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two children.