One Nightstand with Julia Stiles

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

Julia Stiles has long been an expert at multitasking. After breaking out as a 17-year-old in 10 Things I Hate About You, she taped Save The Last Dance and The Bourne Identity while getting her bachelor’s degree at Columbia University. Twenty years later, she’s still at it.

“We went into production three months after I had a baby,” she says her new movie, Wish You Were Here. “It was my third child.” Stiles serves as both director and screenwriter on the production and spent years developing it. “I was just like, I have to do this,” she adds. “Anytime I was scared or felt like I wasn’t taking good enough care of my kids or I wasn’t focused enough on the movie, I just kept thinking — women do this all the time. Doctors do it all the time — doctors go back to work after giving birth very quickly. And what wonderful struggles to have — what a great position to be in, to be able to work and also have kids.”

The end result is a moving account of two people who fall in love in heartbreaking circumstances. “It is a tragic love story but it is also ultimately hopeful,” she says. “I like to describe it as two versions of a love story — there’s the love story that they actually experience in real life together, and then there’s the love story that they dream about, which is heartbreaking to me.”

The film, out now in theaters, is an adaptation of a 2017 novel by Renée Carlino, and it’s books that I’m here with Stiles to discuss today. Namely, some of her recent favorites. But first: a confession. One Nightstand typically calls for a guest’s four favorite books, though Julia sent a long list of six. It was my plan to cull them down after reading, but they were so different that I decided to include them all.

First up: Don’t Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder, a book with personal resonance for Stiles. “It’s is a memoir that [Auder] wrote about her childhood and teenagehood in the Chelsea Hotel,” she says. “Her younger sister Gaby Hoffman and I went to school together, and [Gaby] is also an actress, and I kind of know her through that as adults, but it’s just so nostalgic for me. I actually went trick-or-treating at the Chelsea Hotel when I was like, I think I want to say, nine years old. My mom was not very happy about it. I think she didn’t know that we didn’t have parents with us.”

Stiles turned to her second choice, I’ll Show Myself Out by Jessi Klein, after a big life event. “I had just had my second child, so I was even more kind of overwhelmed, and she just made me laugh out loud and feel like, oh, okay, I’m not alone in this experience,” she says. “I also find there’s a whole guilt complex that I have about reading about parenthood, because if you’re at all addressing the difficulties of it... you feel guilty. It’s like, ‘Oh, you should be so appreciative’ — it’s so complicated. And when you have somebody who’s hilarious about it, it really feels so much better.”

Her third pick, Desperately Seeking Something by Susan Seidelman, speaks to her professional interests. “Desperately Seeking Susan is one of my all-time favorite movies,” she says of Seidelman classic, starring Madonna. “It was a huge reference for me with Wish You Were Here. I sent clips nightly to our production designer, costume designer… I actually reached out to Susan Seidelman — I’m getting bolder in my old age. I slid into her DMs — I said, ‘Can I send you my director’s cut and get your thoughts on it?’ She said sure. And she sent me a really thorough response, and then her book was coming out, so of course I read it.”

Two other books by friends and collaborators also make the cut. First: Listening In The Dark by Amber Tamblyn. “She is a force to be reckoned with,” says Stiles of Tamblyn. “It’s a book of essays encouraging you to listen to your inner voice and follow your gut. It sounds so simple but it can be really hard.” The second, Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke, with whom Stiles starred in Hamlet, offers guidance from a 15th century knight writing to his children on the eve of a battle.

“I have three little boys and I always think about how are we going to raise boys and how is it going to feel for boys to grow up in this world,” says Stiles. “Some of that we can delay until they become teenagers, but a lot of it is early on. I saw this and I think I got it for my husband — or secretly kind of for me.”

Finally, Stiles recommends a book of poetry: Good Bones by Maggie Smith. “Oh my God,” she says, fanning her face. “If I talk about the poem that I particularly love in this book, I’ll probably start crying.” Spoiler alert: Stiles was right, though I gratefully seized the opportunity to ask about her original tearful poetry reading opposite Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You.

“In the table read with the whole cast, I kind of just read it without any emotion and I do remember the director saying, ‘She’ll be more emotional next time,’ so maybe that sunk in.” The tears ended up coming easily — “We’d had such a fun time [making the movie], and it was coming to an end, and it just... the emotion kind of got to me” — though Stiles ended up having to do it twice. “We had to rerecord all of the audio in ADR because there was a creaking dolly,” she says. “So I had to recreate the sound of me getting choked up months earlier.”

Watch the video for more about Stiles’ book choices, and her thoughts on whether modern-day Kat Stratford would be an Instapoet.