Bich Minh Nguyen Recommends...

“Nothing helps my writing, or makes me want to write, more than driving alone on lonely roads. That’s when I turn up the music—radio, scanning the stations for the surprise of what might get played. Something about this combination, the driving, the music, the landscape, feels generative.

I’m currently working on my second nonfiction book and I’m pretty sure it started in the car, Howard Jones singing ‘No One Is to Blame,’ bringing me back, like it or not, to the sorrows of seventh grade. Songs, like food, like movies—signposts of culture, aspiration, childhood—seem always to find themselves in my work. Recent inspirations include Cyndi Lauper, ‘Time After Time,’ REO Speedwagon, ‘Keep on Lovin’ You,’ Fleetwood Mac, ‘Never Going Back Again,’ Poison, ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn,’ Mark Morrison, ‘Return of the Mack,’ When in Rome, ‘The Promise,’ Prince, ‘Purple Rain.’”
—Bich Minh Nguyen, author of Pioneer Girl (Viking Penguin, 2014)