One Nightstand With Allison Williams

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

When Allison Williams speaks of her days as an English major at Yale, it’s with both nostalgia and dread. “If you’re an overachiever, suddenly you’re in seminars with grad students. They would sit there and be like, ‘I only know the word in German to describe the feeling I get when I read this chapter,’” the Regretting You star tells Bustle. “Then it’s some 20-syllable-long word that is so specifically a reference to the feeling and I was like, ‘God, I’m out of my league here.’”

But Williams, 37, has always loved a literary challenge, dating back to when she was in third grade and read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth for the first time. “It was really my introduction to smart writing. I remember it feeling like it was an intellectual reach for me,” she says of the children’s fantasy classic. “It informed my sense of humor in some ways, like my loving vocabulary words.”

She was also introduced to The Odyssey by Homer in elementary school — a book she would return to repeatedly throughout her English studies. “It’s sort of like the Bible to me, or Beowulf. It’s where you have to start from,” she says. “Warfare set against the backdrop of mythology? Then also this journey home, which is something we reference as a culture on most days of our lives? The Odyssey is the beginning [of all literature].”

Another book the Girls actor can’t seem to escape is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “What I love about the book is twofold. One is the book, and the other is the circumstances of the book,” says Williams, who rereads the novel nearly every year. “Mary Shelley was a teenager [on] a long weekend at Lord Byron’s [where they had] a competition for scary stories. She came up with this idea, fully wrote a book, and it’s Frankenstein!”

Unlike these classics, Williams has read Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing only once — but its impact lingers just the same. “It traces one family through two branches of the tree and how they’re linked,” she says of the novel’s two central half-sisters born in 18th-century Ghana: Effia, who marries an Englishman, and Esi, who is sold into slavery. “So you get to see the original pain and trauma and [follow it] through time.” Reflecting on the book’s historical weight, she adds, “You can either pretend it didn’t happen and bury your head in the sand, or try to live a life where you’re in some cosmic way trying to reconcile that.”

Watch the full interview below.