Required Reading is a series in which we invite people we love to recommend five of the books that have defined their journey as a reader. Consider it your new favorite book club.
Megan Fox likes to write at night, after 2 a.m., with candles lit and sorrowful violin music playing. (Honestly, it’s kind of inspiring, and makes me wonder why I haven’t been doing the same.) No one reads her first drafts, and she is quick—perhaps too quick—to toss things out that don’t pass muster. “A lot of it was probably gold, to be honest,” she admits, reflecting on the things she’s tossed. “I don’t recommend this technique.”
Yet from that process came her debut poetry collection, Pretty Boys Are Poisonous (Gallery Books), a wry and moody meditation on sadness and heartbreak drawn from text messages, journal entries, and letters Fox had composed over the years—the places where women have long investigated the drama and theatre of our everyday lives.
Amid something of a golden age for art about the full gamut of female feelings, Fox’s book finds good company in works like Fleabag, Lemonade, and even Sour. “As women we collectively carry millennia worth of trauma and pain,” she tells Vogue in an email. “We’re in an age now, for the first time, where we can rebel against the patriarchy. This book is just a reflection of that.”
Though she is known principally as an actress, writing isn’t new territory for Fox; growing up, she would pen poems for members of her family. “I wrote one for my sister that she still has framed. It contains way too much suffering and angst for an 8-year-old,” Fox recalls dryly. “I just came out this way, an old soul they say…”
The range of subjects covered in Fox’s book—love addiction, abuse, isolation, trauma—might have remained between the pages of her journal, or in her group chats with friends. Why did she want to publish it? She explains, “Honestly, I just needed to expel this from my body. I could have written it all down and burned it […] but then what is the point of having my platform? Why did I go through all this to send it quietly to the universe? I think my hope would be that someone somewhere can realize or identify their boundaries. I hope one feels seen and encouraged to put their own pain into art.”