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“The American voice of the sixties I most identified with turned out to be less Ken Kesey and more Philip Roth. I didn't want to take peyote and have visions in the desert; I wanted to marry a nice psychoanalyst or film critic, live in a brownstone in Park Slope with books and really nice rugs, and send checks to progressive political causes. I didn't want to die young. In fact, I wanted to put off dying as long as possible.”

That’s author Rachel Shukert meditating on what the rock star Jim Morrison taught her about literary taste and her own life in high school, in an essay for Nerve. That teenager is all grown up, and just published her first book, Have You No Shame?.

Today Shukert takes us through her real-life influences, the writers who helped her shape her laugh-out-loud memoir. It's a hyper-linked reading list that will keep you busy all summer.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
You are a bit coy in your book, but you have some very literary influences--mixing up everybody from Joan Didion to the Torah. Who do you read for inspiration? What's the reading list you would give to an aspiring memoirist?

Rachel Shukert:
Well, certainly Joan Didion. Also, David Rakoff, David Sedaris. Follow this link to continue reading...

I read a lot of history, which I think influences my work a lot, at least in structure--and also in the self-aggrandizing way of seeing my place in the grand scheme of things, and then in the next beat acknowledging how ridiculous that is--how inconsequential I am. 

For memoirists, I would recommend Mary McCarthy and Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Fry.  I like a lot of very formal British writers (at least the ones that make fun of play with formality) like Wodehouse and Waugh.  Jonathan Ames.

And a huge influence on me always has and always will be Isaac Bashevis Singer--I kept rereading his short stories and novels while writing Have You No Shame?--the way he creates place, how his prose seems so simple and effortless but is so complex and filled with memory and ideas.