Why is fifteen in fifteen so hard?

My head--my whole world--spins with the possibilities

Lately, there's been a meme flying around Facebook. I've been invited to name fifteen authors who've influenced me and who will always stick with me, and not to take too long about it. I was to list the first fifteen I could recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

One of the reasons this is a difficult task for me (and I'm not alone in this, I know) is that I'm not someone who has a "favorite" genre--like a fantasy buff or historical fiction nut. I enjoy so many different kinds of books. I'm like that with regard to my music, too. I like the Go-Go's, Frank Sinatra, Alison Kraus, and Clément Philibert Léo Delibes, a French composer of ballets, operas, and other works for the stage. I enjoy very eclectic sets--the more varied the better.

Another reason this has proven difficult is that I'm afraid I'll omit someone who's been really important to my development as a writer and as a person. Whenever I compile a list like this based on memory, my mind works like everyone else's--you remember the first and last items better than the ones in the middle. So, there must be some psychological reason why you're not to take too long creating this list. At the same time, one's brain chemistry is merely working in the way it orders and then stores data.

With apologies to those I'm hardwired to forget in the middle, here's my list of authors and the books that most influenced me.

Judith Guest, Ordinary People
John Irving, The World According to Garp, Cider House Rules
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime, World's Fair
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
William Styron, Sophie's Choice
Michael Crichton, Disclosure
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
William Shakespeare, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
Paul Coelho, The Alchemist
Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River
Edgar Allen Poe, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart

And there you have it. I've used up fifteen slots already, and I haven't even mentioned Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bram Stoker, Guy De Maupassant, Melissa Bank, O. Henry, Anton Chekhov, Sue Miller, Phillipa Gregory, Elizabeth George, Susan Isaacs, William Peter Blatty, or Anne Perry.

Who can say why books touch you, why they stay with you. A lot of it has to do with your filter(s) at the time you're reading the book. I had a daughter exactly the same age when I read an Elizabeth George mystery that involved a woman running for Parliament whose young daughter was kidnapped and tortured to death. I was remembering someone I loved as a teenager, who I was later separated from (that's what happened before the advent of the Internet and Facebook), that I thought I'd never see again, when I read Cold Mountain.

I completed this assignment because several people requested I do so. Do I feel better having done so, purged in a sense? No, I feel worse because I know there's someone I've neglected to mention.

In case you were thinking about it, don't ever give me an Academy Award. I'd never be able to live with myself after my acceptance speech.