One Nightstand With Zosia Mamet

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.

While growing up in Hollywood prepared Zosia Mamet for the demands of show business, nothing could have readied her for the loneliness. Especially the kind she experienced in her early 20s, when all of her friends had left for college, and she spent her days on audition after audition — the era she writes about in her wickedly acerbic essay collection, Does This Make Me Funny?, out Sept. 9. “All I would do at night was learn my lines and read a ton. I read a lot of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, John O’Hara,” Mamet tells Bustle. “I was a very lonely person but I could see myself in these characters and yearn for the things that they yearned for.”

Now, nearly two decades into her career, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice remains one of her all-time favorites. “There’s an element that’s so escapist to her writing. It made the rest of my world just totally disappear,” says Mamet. “Pride and Prejudice made me feel so much, but it was about things that had nothing to do with me. It was so invigorating.”

If Austen gave her a way out of LA, Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company brought her right back into it. “She is a powerful, entertaining writer for anyone. But I think as someone who grew up in Hollywood, there’s something about LA that’s so hard to capture and describe. It’s both disgusting and the most magical place,” says the Girls star. “The seesaw effect of living there can just give you whiplash, and it hit so hard for me when I read it because it made me feel so seen and understood.”

For a long time, Mamet resisted reading anything contemporary. (“I was living with my dad who basically [thought] anything created after 1984 [was] trash,” she says.) But in years since, recent releases like The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne have become canon to her as well. “What caught me so off-guard was just the journey of this man’s entire life and how beautifully and unabashedly that story is told,” she says. “There hadn't been a piece of literature that felt like it pulled my heart out of my chest in a really long time.”

Then there’s the modern writer whose work impacted her so deeply that meeting him left Mamet starstruck: David Sedaris, author of Me Talk Pretty One Day. “He wrote me and asked if I wanted to have breakfast with him. I freaked out for a month about what to wear, what I wanted to say, and how to not act weird,” she says. “Then the day arrived and I got there way too early and went into the bathroom and was like, ‘I physically can’t!’ I was so worried.’”

Not only did she survive the breakfast, she turned it into one of the funniest essays in her new book — one that’s sure to make readers feel as seen as these titles have left Mamet.