Paige Lewis is the author of Canon, out today from Viking. Below, they discuss three of the books, movies, and TV shows that influenced their debut novel.
Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day: When I was an editor for my undergraduate newspaper, I had the opportunity to interview Don Hertzfeldt, who was touring a few dozen theaters with his animated feature film, It’s Such a Beautiful Day.
While I remember nothing about that interview (sorry, Don), I can clearly remember the absolute awe I felt while at the screening for It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which follows the life of Bill, a man suffering from an unidentified form of memory loss. Hertzfeldt narrates the film and, while I can’t say too much without spoilers, I will say that his role and behavior as the film’s narrator highly influenced the voice of the narrator in Canon.
Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen: Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks has been a wildly important influence on Canon. Brooks’s book is split into three parts, each following a different section of the life of the titular Annie Allen, a Black woman growing up in Chicago. The middle section, an epic with the incredible title “The Anniad”, follows Annie’s journey through a relationship irrevocably affected when her beloved is sent off to war and comes back with PTSD.
I remember reading “The Anniad” for the first time and having my understanding of the hero’s journey completely challenged and expanded. This epic isn’t about the soldier, it’s about how his behavior affects the journey of the actual hero, Annie. The relationship between Annie and her mother in this book also helped me to make sense of the mother/child relationship in my book.
The Simpsons: The first ten seasons of The Simpsons are the reason I’m a writer. When I was young, I often experienced art and literature through the lens of The Simpsons—the first time I ever heard Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” was when James Earl Jones read the poem in its entirety during the very first “Treehouse of Horror” episode. Soon after, I asked my mom for a copy of Poe’s complete works, and I carried that gilded book around my middle school like a Bible.
This sort of discovering literature through Simpsons parodies and references continued well into adulthood. My husband, Kaveh Akbar, who I first met because of our shared love of The Simpsons, likes to say that the more literature we read, the more we understand the jokes on The Simpsons. It’s absolutely true! Without The Simpsons, there would be no Canon.