Alison Owings:

Whenever I get an idea for an oral-history book, I start futzing — e.g., conducting trial-run interviews, making lists — while also inundating myself with background reading. Eventually, futzing slides toward competitiveness. What have I missed? Or, thrillingly, what has everyone else missed? And there’s a concomitant nag: How to assess what I’m reading. Brilliance or dross? (In other words, did the trees die in vain?)

The amount of published background material has proved wildly divergent. For Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, I faced mountains of volumes and ascended no more than a fraction in English or German. For Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray, I realized with pique, tinged with relief, that few writers paid attention to the women who serve. Next, when preparing to interview a cross-country section of Native Americans about their lives (Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans), I again encountered a printed deluge, not only about the overall Indigenous population and history, but also books about distinct tribes. I plunged in.

For my latest book, Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco, my reading focused on homelessness-related accounts, such as This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home by Lauren Sandler, as well as some eight works about the Tenderloin, books that raised my usual concerns about encroachment and redundancy.

Yet while I read widely and deeply for information, I never knowingly read for style. Mine, honed by years of journalism — most gut-clenchingly when writing for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite — and by my own evolving approach to the English language, suits me and my editors fine. But I wonder. Do we writers, in our larval stage of composition, gravitate toward authors who inspire us via a compositional hip-bump and sense that we’re sharing a mutual groove? Or do we wall off any such influence?

(Warning: Name-drop approaching.)

Years ago, at a friend’s party in New York, there stood Toni Morrison. After moderating my gushes, I asked her what she was reading. She smiled and said she tried not to read anything that might affect her style. Thus, the farthest book from such danger was her current choice: Gloria Vanderbilt’s autobiography. Ha! (I forget which one; Vanderbilt wrote several.)

Absent such dangers or comparisons, what am I reading now? While mentally futzing about the subject of another book, at my bedside awaits the novel Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. Ja, auf Deutsch. My uneven fluency has slipped since I interviewed the Frauen in their (not my) native tongue. And Erpenbeck is fabelhaft.   

Alison Owings is a freelance journalist, editor, and oral historian based in Northern California. She hopes to talk herself out of her next book idea, which involves ICE. Meanwhile, married to an early-to-bed man, she again reads books the way she did as a child: under the covers with a flashlight.