Friday, October 14, 2011

Lucette Lagnado's 6 favorite books

Lucette Lagnado was born in Cairo, Egypt. She and her family left Egypt as refugees when she was a small child, an experience that helped shape and inform her memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. Her follow-up memoir, The Arrogant Years, revisits her first years in America, and describes a difficult coming-of-age interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16.

One of her six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

For me, the ultimate book about family. I have always found Tyler's characters compelling, in particular their desperate longing to re-create hearth and home in a world that seems to conspire against both. The hero, Ezra, does so by opening a restaurant that serves basically what he feels like making on any particular day — the ultimate home-cooked meal, in effect. An enormous influence on me as I set out to attack similar themes in my two memoirs.
Read about another book on Lagnado's list.

--Marshal Zeringue