One Nightstand with Pauline Chalamet

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

Pauline Chalamet is fangirling. We’re chatting about her favorite books, and when our conversation turns to Dorothy Wickenden’s The Agitators — which follows three key female members of the abolitionist movement — she can hardly contain herself. “I'm obsessed with Dorothy Wickenden. My dream is to sit down and get coffee with her,” says The Sex Lives of College Girls star. “Anytime she writes something in the New Yorker, I devour it. Sometimes I'll be reading something and I’ll be like, ‘Who wrote this? It’s great!’ And it’s always Dorothy.”

It’s not just Wickenden she’s enamored with, though — Chalamet’s enthusiasm for each author we discuss is just as palpable. Just take Salman Rushdie, whose novel Midnight’s Children introduced her to a whole new genre. “I have a really hard time with fantasy and adhering to totally different rules of a different world. But reading Salman Rushdie opened me up to the possibility that you don't have to read fantasy as real,” she says. “[In this book] all the children across India that are born at midnight have this telepathic power where they can all communicate with each other. You just need to accept [the fantasy], read it, and enjoy it.”

Then there’s Elaine Dundy, who offered Chalamet a fresh perspective on Paris — the city she now calls home. “I was really into reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald around this time, and when I read The Dud Avocado, I was like, ‘This feels like a female gaze The Sun Also Rises,” she explains. “I just got such a kick out of Sally Jay’s adventures and the commentary on the American expat and how they behave when they're abroad.”

But if there’s one author Chalamet recommends to every person she comes across, it’s Alexandre Dumas. “I read The Count of Monte Cristo during the pandemic and I would not shut up about this book. I’m use [usually] quite solitary about the books that I read but with The Count I was like, ‘I do not understand people who haven’t read this book,’” she says. Her pitch to friends and family? “It has every single element of every genre, every character you can imagine, any possible occurrence between two people happens!”

Below, you’ll find our full conversation with Chalamet — in which she discusses her thoughts on two-person book clubs, social media activism, and partying in Paris.