Happiness & Love author Zoe Dubno thinks Martin Amis can get boys hooked on reading – debutiful

In her debut novel, Happiness & Love, Zoe Dubno follows a young woman who, after returning to New York for her former best friend’s funeral, is drawn into a downtown dinner party that spirals into chaos. Prior to releasing her debut novel, her fiction has appeared in Granta and Muumuu House and NY Tyrant. She’s published nonfiction in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, and BOMB.

We asked Dubno to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and what influenced her debut novel.

What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?

Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis. Oh to be saved from WASPY boarding school hell by a fabulous bohemian aunt who cavorts with eccentrics, sends you to nudist school, and teaches you to make martinis.

What book helped you through puberty?

The first one that comes to mind is, strangely, A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I was into Hemingway in general, but this book was my refuge. I was secretly obsessed with “Europe,” cooking French food, longing to be friends with writers and artists, clothes, poetry. Even growing up in New York can feel parochial, especially as everyone in my school was desperate to work in finance, so the world of A Moveable Feast felt like a dream, heaven. I remember eating a ham and cheese sandwich at school on a spring afternoon by myself on the grass with my copy from the library. Heaven.

What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?

The Odyssey, The Bible, The Bell Jar, The Catcher in the Rye.  

If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?

Chekhov short stories for the sentences.

Anna Karenina for the scale.

Persuasion by Jane Austen for the drama.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing to show what good political fiction is.

The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt to show you can do whatever you want.

Erasure by Percival Everett for the satire and formal play and overall genius.

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, because I think it could make the boys in the class get into fiction… (in my mind, this is high school, because of the above high school questions.)

What books helped guide you while writing your book?

The Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard gave me the shape of the novel. But also, all of Julie Hecht’s books which are the funniest short stories and novels in existence. Ravelstein by Saul Bellow, which is about complex friendship. Counternarratives by John Keene, which showed me how to be in conversation with another text while doing something totally your own. 

What books are on your nightstand now?

The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels, Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time by Proust, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New World Order in Wellness by Stewart Home, and The Utopians a book of poems by my friend Grace Nissan.