People often ask writers what their favorite books are.
That’s actually a difficult question for me because my favorite books change depending on the day, my mood, and where I am in life. There are hundreds of books I have loved over the years, from children’s books to literary fiction, fantasy, horror, history, and memoir.
A more interesting question might be:
Which books changed you?
When I think about that question, I keep coming back to three books I encountered between roughly the ages of ten and thirteen:
Forrest Gump by Winston Groom.
The Dark Half by Stephen King.
The Gunslinger by Stephen King.
At first glance, those books don’t seem to have much in common. One is a strange literary satire, one is psychological horror, and one is the opening chapter of an epic fantasy western that would eventually become The Dark Tower.
Yet looking back, I can see the fingerprints of all three everywhere in my life and writing.
The timing matters.
When I found those books, I was a kid who spent a tremendous amount of time reading. I read constantly. If there was a book nearby, I would pick it up. One day it might be Wayside School. The next it might be Bunnicula. Then a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Then something completely inappropriate for my age that I somehow got my hands on and devoured anyway.
Reading wasn’t something I did because I wanted to be a writer.
Reading was somewhere I went.
By that age I had already been introduced to loss. I had already seen things that made me aware the world wasn’t as safe or simple as adults often pretend it is. I had friends, but I also carried a persistent feeling that I didn’t fully belong anywhere. I moved between groups, between interests, between identities.
More than anything, I was trying to figure out who I was.
Not what I wanted to be.
Who I was.
That question would follow me for decades.
Looking back, I think that’s why these books landed so hard.
Forrest Gump was probably the first book that showed me a person moving through a complicated world without always understanding why things happened to him or why certain experiences stayed with him. It planted questions I wouldn’t fully understand until years later. There are parts of that novel that make far more sense to me now than they did when I first read it, but even then it connected with something I couldn’t yet name.
The Dark Half introduced me to the idea that people contain contradictions. That we have public selves and private selves. That there are parts of ourselves we celebrate and parts we hide. Long before I had language for recovery, trauma, grief, shadow work, or self-examination, that book was asking questions about identity that I was already wrestling with.
Then there was The Gunslinger.
People often talk about Roland’s quest, the world-building, the weirdness, the fantasy, or the Tower itself.
What I remember is something else.
I remember the feeling that there was a center to things.
A destination.
A pattern.
A structure.
The idea that life might not simply be random events crashing into one another, but part of something larger that could be explored, questioned, and pursued.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I think that book gave me permission to think big.
Not in terms of success.
In terms of meaning.
The older I get, the more I realize that all three books were asking variations of the same question I was asking myself.
Who are you?
Not who do other people think you are.
Not who are you supposed to be.
Not who do you pretend to be.
Who are you really?
It’s a question that has followed me through adoption, addiction, recovery, grief, fatherhood, writing, cancer, and everything else life has thrown at me.
It’s probably the same question sitting underneath almost everything I’ve ever written.
Looking back, I don’t think these books simply influenced my writing.
I think they helped shape the architecture of how I think.
The confused observer trying to understand his life.
The divided self trying to reconcile competing truths.
The traveler searching for meaning at the center of a vast structure.
I can still see all three of them.
Not just in my work.
In me.
Maybe that’s what truly influential books do.
You don’t finish reading them.
You spend the rest of your life discovering what they were trying to tell you.
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 
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