Having partnered with Noah Baumbach on indie darlings Frances Ha and Mistress America, Greta Gerwig stepped out on her own for Lady Bird, a breakout film in 2017 that garnered swooning notices, Golden Globe nominations, and established her as a triple-threat writer-director-actor. Her mega hits Little Women and Barbie have since cemented her reputation as the most bankable woman director in Hollywood. Although she came to fame as an actor in movies by Woody Allen and Whit Stillman, Gerwig’s interest in writing was sparked by playwrights such as Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller, and liberated by fellow Californian Joan Didion. “It was the first time I’d read something by an artist—a great artist—who was working in the same place I was from and writing about it,” she told Francis Ford Coppola in Interview magazine. “And it was the first inkling I had that maybe I didn’t need to be a different person in order to make something that was worth anything.”

Below are Greta Gerwig’s favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.