Round-up stories are popular features, and for an article that appeared in Nylon Kristin Iversen rounded up 25 writers and asked them what book inspired them to want to be a writer.

“For me,” responded Siobhan Vivian, author of Stay Sweet, “that book was Rabbit, Run by John Updike, which I read during my first semester of undergrad. I was studying to be a screenwriter, and most of my classes were about film but I took a narrative fiction class as an elective, and this was the first book we were assigned.

“I loved how dark and sexy it was, how Rabbit—the protagonist—stayed unlikeable and irredeemable and petulant to the very end. It was unlike anything I’d been assigned to read in high school, a big beautiful middle finger to an English department cannon. And the prose is so lovely, I can still quote lines of description from memory.

“Reading it made me want to subvert expectations, break rules, be a little naughty . . . unsurprising, as I’ve always had a soft spot for bad boys.”

Read the full Nylon article.