5 Books I Can’t Live Without: Ilene Beckerman, Author of The Smartest Woman I Know

Ilene Beckerman’s writing career began at the age of sixty when she wrote the memoir Love, Loss, and What I Wore. The book has been adapted to an Off-Broadway play that has been a great success. She wrote three more books before recently publishing The Smartest Woman I Know (see my review).

Beckerman says of her late-blooming writing success, “Oprah did a profile of me, my books have been translated into many languages I can’t speak, I’ve written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Ladies Home Journal, and many other magazines, and I speak to women’s groups and book clubs all over the country. If someone had told me all this would happen to me, I would have told them to stop smoking whatever they were smoking.” Here are the five books she can’t live without.

Oh, to be back in high school if I could know what I know now. The books I read when I was a young girl influenced me more that the Saul Bellows and Chekovs I read later. I’ve held on to these five books through the years and reread them from time to time trying to remember the girl I used to be.

The Amboy Dukes, by Irving Shulman
The “hot” book of 1947. A sexy story of a bunch of juvenile delinquents. A “bad” book I hid under my mattress because I was a very innocent, un-sexy twelve-year old.

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Little did I know that it was voted the best book of the 20th century in France. To me, it was a magical book, deep but easy to understand.. And the drawings–maybe the first graphic novel—still influence my work.

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
“Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value…”—Howard Ruark. When I was younger, Ayn Rand’s philosophy blew my mind. Then I saw the movie. Gary Cooper played Ruark and Patricia O’Neill played Dominique. They blew my mind even more!

Winesburg, Ohio (Oxford World’s Classics), by Sherwood Anderson
These stories took me to a dark world of loneliness and desperation I knew nothing about. It was assigned in my high school English class and I couldn’t believe that we could talk about these bizarre characters out loud.

Strange Interlude, by Eugene O’Neill
The play where O’Neill implied that women need three types of men in their lives—father, husband, lover. I spent several years trying to find one man that combined all three. I stopped looking when I realized that not everything you read is true.