Excerpt from The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors by Laura Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So what "lesbian" books shaped me? Sula and Member of the Wedding definitely. I reread them now, and for me they remain lesbian books. I think my lifelong struggle not to be as ridiculous, obvious, and oblivious as young Frankie saved me from being quite as blind to my own obsessions. Of course, this didn't help me to foresee all the other ways I would become as ridiculous as Frankie was. You can't get everything from books. And I know my sense of the honor between women and the importance of female friendship was buoyed up by Sula.

I would also put in one of the Ann Bannon novels—perhaps Odd Girl Out or Beebo Brinker, though I find them difficult to reread these days. When I was young, Bannon's books let me imagine myself into her New York City neighborhoods of short-haired, dark-eyed butch women and stubborn, tight-lipped secretaries with hearts ready to be broken. Her books come close to the kind of books that had made me feel fatalistic and damned in my youth, but somehow she just managed to sustain a sense of hope. And of course, there was her romantic portrait of the kind of butch woman I idealized. I would have dated Beebo, no question, although, like a lot of my early girlfriends, she would have grown quickly bored with my political convictions and insistence on activism.

Yes, Rubyfruit Jungle would be on my list because it made me laugh out loud and fantasize about moving to New York City and lobbing grapefruits at rich white men while dating actresses and writing my own novels. It was also written with a kind of joyful passion that countered all those deadly suicidal lesbian novels I had grown to hate.

I would want to list Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller because it is a love story I believed and a couple I could imagine walking around in my own little Southern neighborhood. It is hard for me to honor and enjoy romantic fiction and love stories. While I sometimes felt that, by the time I first read it, I was a little too old and untrusting for Patience and Sarah, I never doubted the truth of their love. It remains, thankfully, a book I enjoy.

There is one book I would put on any list of my most important and that is The Female Man by Joanna Russ, although I loved all her Alyx books. It is as hard and mean and fine as a Flannery O'Connor short story, if you could imagine Flannery stepping into an experimental mode more perverse than the one she managed with Wise Blood. It is also a true feminist classic, although I find that when I say that too many people smirk and look away. So, let me also say that it is almost as romantic as Patience and Sarah, with equally believable lovers and madwomen.

I wish that everyone would read Joanna Russ's books. I remember with pleasure Picnic on Paradise, the first novel where the character Alyx appears. At the time, I was about as doctrinaire as any lesbian-feminist in history, but I remember realizing that it made no difference to me that Alyx was not the lesbian I had first thought her to be. She was screwing a teenage boy with Walkman headphones plugged into his ears every chance she got, and still seemed completely a dyke to me. Russ gave me the idea that there were lots of different ways to be queer, and that even running off to another planet might not fix my life. She made me think that I better pay a bit more attention to life on this planet, and of course she also had a sense of humor. I require a sense of humor in all things.

Oh, what a relief it is to live in the world we have made! As cruel and prejudiced as it is, it is not the world in which I was a girl. We do not have to live hidden lives. We do not have to re-imagine ourselves into the bland over-mind. We have books, stacks and stacks of books on every imaginable subject written by lesbians, all kinds of lesbians.

Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Viking Penguin. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.