My literary damage report:
20 authors who ruined me, gently
There are easier ways to fall apart than making a list like this.
But here we are.
It started as a Goodreads rabbit hole, then turned into a joke about printing a receipt for my emotional damage, and somewhere along the way, I realized this list felt more personal than I expected. These aren’t just authors I admire. They’re the ones who rewired me. The ones who whispered in the quiet places of my brain and left the lights on. Some I return to for comfort. Others I return to like pressing on a bruise.
Here is my list of writers who have shaped how I think, read, and ache. Authors who feel like emotional coordinates, a map of where I’ve been, and who I was when I found them.
Some write magic like it’s math. Others lace grief into their prose like thread. They all, in their own way, made me feel seen.
So here they are. Twenty names. No refunds
20. Brian K. Vaughan
comic book heartbreak. genre with a soul.
He made me cry over a ghost baby, a bisexual bounty hunter, and a lying cat, sometimes all on the same page. Saga taught me that graphic novels can carry just as much literary weight as anything on a syllabus.
19. Amanda Montell
linguistic sass. feminist fire. nonfiction with teeth.
If language is power, Montell is holding the match. Her books are what happens when sociolinguistics meets pop culture, rage, and femininity. She’s sharp, funny, and alarmingly good at making you rethink every sentence you’ve ever said — or been told.
18. Lewis Carroll
whimsy with dread. the original literary fever dream.
I was too young the first time I read Alice. I thought it was about tea parties and white rabbits. Then I got older and realized it was about identity crises, ontological dread, and bad men in top hats. Carroll wrote surrealism before we had a name for it. He cracked the English language open and asked, "What if we got very strange and very serious at the same time?"
17. Ava Reid
folklore. blood. girls becoming monsters to survive.
If trauma had teeth, Ava Reid would give it a name and a myth. Her books (The Wolf and the Woodsman, Juniper & Thorn) blend fairytale logic with raw psychological horror — not the jump-scare kind, but the kind that lingers under your skin. Her women are devoured and reborn.
16. Pablo Neruda
sensual sadness. communist love poems.
There’s something about Neruda that makes me want to sit on a tiled floor in a linen shirt and cry into red wine. He writes love with the precision of a blade and the weight of a revolution. Every time I read him, I remember that desire is a political act. That metaphor is sacred. If you’ve ever wanted someone to describe your body like a coastline, Neruda has already done it — and better.
15. V.E. Schwab
gay coats. parallel worlds. emotional restraint in red and black.
Schwab writes stories like architectural blueprints — precise, layered, and devastating if you press too hard on the wrong wall. Her heroes are tired. Her villains are beautiful. Her prose is clean like a knife, and underneath it is that quiet queer ache that says: I don’t want to be the chosen one. I just want to be safe. And maybe kissed.
14. Madeline Miller
myth retold. love made holy. prose dipped in olive oil and heartbreak.
I read The Song of Achilles once and never emotionally recovered. Miller doesn’t just rewrite myths, she tenderly disassembles them, then builds them back into something queer, aching, and undeniably human. Her sentences are soft, but they hit like tidal waves. She understands that some stories were always meant to be sad, and that some lovers were always meant to be doomed.
13. Sylvia Plath
flowers in the furnace. feminine rage.
Plath is the literary equivalent of holding your breath underwater just to feel the ache. The Bell Jar was the first book that felt like it saw me. Not the version of me I show at parties, but the one curled in bed rereading the same sentence six times. Her poetry is furious and delicate at once. She writes the body like it’s a battlefield and a temple. She made madness lyrical and pain almost holy. I read her and think: oh. So I’m not alone.
12. Donna Tartt
elite academic collapse. slow-burn murder. nostalgia weaponized.
Tartt’s books feel like old film photographs — golden-toned, slightly cursed, and just a little out of reach. No one builds atmosphere like her: you can smell the cigarettes, hear the echo of shoes in a marble hallway, feel the weight of secrets pressing against the windows. Her characters are brilliant, terrible people. I love every single one of them.
11. Haruki Murakami
cats. wells. women who vanish and metaphors that never explain themselves.
Reading Murakami is like waking from a dream and not being sure if something terrible happened, or if you just missed something important. His books don’t resolve, they resonate. He talks about loneliness like it’s a second language. There’s always a jazz record playing somewhere, a girl you can’t quite hold on to, and a sentence that feels like déjà vu.
10. Mona Awad
cult girlhood. surreal horror. pink lipstick and psychological decay.
Bunny made me feel seen in the worst way. Rouge made me question mirrors. Awad writes with the fevered cadence of someone who's seen too much and still wants more. Her women are feral, desperate, obsessive and you root for them anyway. She blends beauty with body horror, feminine archetypes with shapeshifting dread. Her prose is a descent, and I go willingly every time.
9. Oscar Wilde
decadence. wit. gay tragedy behind a smirk.
Beneath the wit and crystalline prose lies an intimate understanding of shame, desire, and performative identity. The Picture of Dorian Gray was my first encounter with literary queerness rendered both beautiful and tragic.
8. J.R.R. Tolkien
worldbuilding as devotion. myth as memory.
Tolkien didn’t just write fantasy. He built language and let stories grow inside it. Reading him feels like wandering through a cathedral — reverent, massive, and echoing with something older than you. His characters mourn more than they celebrate. His trees remember things. His stories taught me that magic doesn’t have to be loud to be sacred.
7. Brandon Sanderson
engineering emotions. logic meets legend.
I went into Sanderson for the plot and stayed. The Cosmere is a masterclass in structure — the kind of thing that makes you want to color-code timelines. But what gets me every time is how deeply he cares about consequence. He writes about faith, failure, and redemption with so much clarity it hurts.
6. Emily Brontë
gothic yearning. emotional chaos on a windswept moor.
Wuthering Heights is not a love story. It’s a spiritual breakdown that smells like wet heather and heartbreak. Emily Brontë wrote one book, dropped the mic, and vanished. Every line pulses with anger, longing, and impossible intimacy. Her characters don’t fall in love — they combust.
5. Markus Zusak
grief in second person. the book that made you believe in language again.
I read The Book Thief as a teenager and have never truly recovered. It taught me that narration can be omniscient and still unbearably human. That words can be weapons. That Death can have empathy. Zusak doesn’t just write scenes — he paints them with sentences that slow you down and split you open. He was one of the first authors who made me feel like pain and beauty might not be opposites. And if The Book Thief is the only Zusak you've read, I highly recommend I am the Messenger.
4. Susanna Clarke
labyrinthine language. lonely magic. time as a religion.
Reading Piranesi felt like dreaming in Latin. Clarke’s worlds aren’t just beautiful — they’re sacred. She writes silence like other people write dialogue. Her characters are always remembering something they were never told. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell taught me to romanticize footnotes. Piranesi taught me to revere small kindnesses.
3. Patrick Ness
sci-fi for the soul. gentle boys holding grief like knives.
He gets it. He gets you. Every Ness book I’ve read has felt like a private conversation between my gut and a mirror. The Knife of Never Letting Go is the first book I ever wanted to throw across the room and immediately reread. He writes trauma with grace, and adolescence with real, raw fury. His characters are always running — from war, from loss, from themselves. And I’m always running with them.
2. Julia Armfield
queer grief. horror disguised as longing.
Our Wives Under the Sea is a book I read slowly, like holding my breath underwater. Every sentence is damp with sadness. Every page is a dissolving boundary — between woman and monster, love and absence, science and myth. Armfield writes like she’s trying to explain what loneliness tastes like. And she does.
1. R.F. Kuang
rage, rewritten. colonialism, dissected. fantasy sharpened to a blade.
There is a before and after with Kuang. The Poppy War trilogy wrecked me — morally, emotionally, politically. Then Babel buried me under footnotes and historical fury and I said thank you. Her books are not safe. They’re not tidy. They hurt. But they are brilliant. And bold. And furious in ways that make you feel seen. She doesn't just write about systems of power — she cracks them open and hands you the splinters.
And that's it.
That’s the list.
Twenty authors who carved something out of me — who rewrote how I think, feel, and hold a sentence in my mouth. Some I met when I was too young to understand them. Others found me exactly when they were supposed to. All of them, in their own way, offered something sharp and strange and beautiful that stayed.
This isn’t a definitive ranking. It’s a weather report. A literary pulse check. A receipt of every time I closed a book and thought, Oh. So this is going to live with me now.
I know some of these names are familiar. Others might be new. Maybe one of them will find you at just the right time — when you need a line that cuts, or comforts, or makes you believe in the magic of language again.
And now I want to know yours.
Drop your top 5. Or just the one author you’ll never forgive — in the best possible way.
—love, amanda