11 Best Books to Gift Writers and Aspiring Authors

In one of the chapters of Jami Attenberg’s memoir, I Came All This Way To Meet You, she describes getting drinks with another writer. Attenberg had just found success—good reviews, invested readers—with one of her novels, and this other writer wanted to know how she’d done it. Why this book, why now? The formula for writerly success. The short answer: no formula. As Attenberg writes: “The thing with being a novelist—or really with any creative endeavor—is we have to willingly enter into the not knowing.” This book, then, is no formula, either. Instead, it’s a sharp account of one person’s journey towards and into authorship: giving readings, three books in, to a sparse group of eight people; having a boyfriend refuse to read a long-worked-on manuscript; attempting to wrest back control on a long book tour through eight specifically chosen dresses; turning forty and sleeping in “twenty-six locations in seven months.” Those are the accouterments of being an author, yes, but the sustaining force in the book is Attenberg’s comfort in being a writer: “When I write, it’s a place I can go to feel safe.” It’s a reminder that while so much of publishing lies beyond one’s control, the act of translating thoughts into words on a blank page can be utterly private, utterly self-guided. “I own these words. I own these ideas,” she writes in a short preamble. “Here is my book.” (Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating With The Dead is another great memoir on the twisty life-turns that comprise becoming a writer, as is, of course, Stephen King’s On Writing.) (2022, Ecco)