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Required Reading is a series in which we invite people we love to recommend five of the books that have defined their journey as a reader. Consider it your new favorite book club.
Megan Fox likes to write at night, after 2 a.m., with candles lit and sorrowful violin music playing. (Honestly, it’s kind of inspiring, and makes me wonder why I haven’t been doing the same.) No one reads her first drafts, and she is quick—perhaps too quick—to toss things out that don’t pass muster. “A lot of it was probably gold, to be honest,” she admits, reflecting on the things she’s tossed. “I don’t recommend this technique.”
Yet from that process came her debut poetry collection, Pretty Boys Are Poisonous (Gallery Books), a wry and moody meditation on sadness and heartbreak drawn from text messages, journal entries, and letters Fox had composed over the years—the places where women have long investigated the drama and theatre of our everyday lives.
Amid something of a golden age for art about the full gamut of female feelings, Fox’s book finds good company in works like Fleabag, Lemonade, and even Sour. “As women we collectively carry millennia worth of trauma and pain,” she tells Vogue in an email. “We’re in an age now, for the first time, where we can rebel against the patriarchy. This book is just a reflection of that.”
Though she is known principally as an actress, writing isn’t new territory for Fox; growing up, she would pen poems for members of her family. “I wrote one for my sister that she still has framed. It contains way too much suffering and angst for an 8-year-old,” Fox recalls dryly. “I just came out this way, an old soul they say…”
The range of subjects covered in Fox’s book—love addiction, abuse, isolation, trauma—might have remained between the pages of her journal, or in her group chats with friends. Why did she want to publish it? She explains, “Honestly, I just needed to expel this from my body. I could have written it all down and burned it […] but then what is the point of having my platform? Why did I go through all this to send it quietly to the universe? I think my hope would be that someone somewhere can realize or identify their boundaries. I hope one feels seen and encouraged to put their own pain into art.”
As Fox makes her publishing debut, read on for a list of the five books that changed her life.
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van Der Kolk
This is not an easy read, I’ll be honest. It’s on the clinical side but it explains how the body stores emotional trauma and how that manifests as chronic illness. It introduced me to the idea that disease is actually dis-ease (mental/emotional unrest). I think it’s an essential read for everyone but especially for anyone suffering from PTSD.
Journey of Souls by Michael Newton
This book changed my life. The philosophy of reincarnation always resonated with me even as a young child, but this book gave me a framework to really understand it in a practical way. The author was a regression therapist who accidentally started regressing people into their lives in between lives. It describes in detail where the soul journeys after death and before its next reincarnation. It’s fascinating and also comforting.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
I read this book when I was very young. I feel like my mother gave it to me when I was about 10. I remember deeply identifying with Jonathan’s struggle to belong and to feel a part of something while also maintaining his unique identity. Being outcast for refusing to conform to ideas or ways of living that seemed antiquated and limiting. The search for something more, the knowing that something lies beyond what we see, that there is an eternal presence or intelligence guiding our lives, the sorrow that we feel being separated from this intelligence, being separated from our beginning, our forever. I believe this book was responsible for my 5th grade existential crisis.
Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self by Sandra Ingerman
This is the first book I read on Shamanism. I used this book to do my first soul journey, to discover my spirit animal, kill parts of my ego, burn or cleanse hurtful words and actions I’ve taken against others, and to restore parts of my soul that had been stolen through the violent actions of others.
Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken
I remember reading this book and having a very clear, almost comical Aha! moment. I always wanted to be Indiana Jones, to discover ancient artifacts and answer century-old questions about where we came from and why. This was the first time I realized that the stories in the Bible (I was raised very religious) were a part of one story that had been told across many continents and people over the course of thousands and thousands of years. What if the “gods” in all these religious texts were actually aliens…and I was never the same.