My first book hasn't even come out yet, but I'm already being asked a question I dread. It's on every list of questions presented to a writer. Publicists, readers, people who come to readings all ask it. Even Goodreads has it listed as one of the questions to answer when an author sets up his or her page.

What question could be as awful as all that, you ask? "Which authors have influenced your work?" Or some variation on it. Just seeing those words paralyzes me. They have the ability to freeze me like a possum in the moments before it plays dead.

On its face, the question seems innocuous. Most people, no matter their field, learn from others who came before. I have a friend who teaches first grade. She can name individual educators from whom she has taken valuable lessons. A lawyer friend holds up some pioneering attorneys and Supreme Court Justices as heroes. I am a writer. The logic only follows that I should be able to rattle off a handful of names of those who preceded me.

Don't get me wrong. There are books that I love and writers I admire. I have been known to cancel Saturday night plans so that I can re-read Toni Morrison's Beloved. I am in awe of the way that book was written. The same is true of Jane Gardam's Old Filth trilogy, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall books, and The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, among many, many others. And those are just the names that happen to spring to mind today. Catch me on another day and I'll come up with an entirely different list.

I'd say those novels influenced me, that I read them with an eye toward learning about the craft of writing. But Morrison has written a bunch of books I don't like. That's true of Gardam, too. I find Faulkner's late work practically unreadable (funny, I know, since so many people say that about Absalom, Absalom). I put down Mantel's recent collection of short stories midway; and I haven't (yet) read anything else by Kushner.

What it comes down to is that there are books that I can point to that have stayed with me--for years or even decades. They're not all "literary," either. There was a mystery I read over and over in high school--long before I moved, or even thought about moving, to Los Angeles--about a woman in LA who gets in over her head after someone is killed. It wasn't a classic, just a paperback I picked up along the way somewhere. I don't even remember the title, but scenes from it are still lodged in my mind, especially one in which she falls into the largest of the La Brea tar pits, which I now know is quite a feat, since there's a giant fence around it. If memory serves, she climbs over the fence, which is, as anyone who has ever stepped in tar can tell you, a pretty stupid decision.

Did that novel influence me? I don't know. Probably. Because I was a reader long before I became a writer. I still am. I'd still rather read a book than watch tv. The only difference is that now that I have kids I don't usually have Saturday night plans to cancel. It's a cliche, but I have always thought of myself as a sponge when it comes to books. I just get denser and denser with each one I read.

I don't want to overplay this. There are books that I've read with my mouth hanging open in admiration, and others that I've cast aside and forgotten. (True story: one time, I got halfway through a bestseller that shall remain nameless, only to realize that I had read it already.) So it would be an exaggeration to say that I count everything I have ever read as an influence. I have learned something from every book I've read, though, even if only what I don't like, which is, I think, a type of influence in and of itself.

We can learn from anything if we're so inclined. Books have been my teachers, my companions, my loves. It's hard to point to just a few and say, "these, above all the others, are most important to me." So, ask me what I'm reading. Ask what I think about a particular book. Ask me how I finally wrote my book. But please don't ask which writers influenced me the most. I'll have to play possum, and I hate possums.