Lindsay Lohan's jailhouse reading list

Avi Steinberg, a former prison librarian, is the author of the forthcoming book, Running the Books, due out in November.

For The Daily Beast, he named a brief list of books Lindsay Lohan should read while serving her jail sentence. One book on the list:

Lit
by Mary Karr

On her Twitter page, Lohan refers to herself as “a writer.” She has been working on a memoir for over a year now. What type of writer is she? It’s unlikely that she herself has the answer to this question. She will discover some hints in the writings of others. If she wishes to do something more than a celebrity memoir and not fall into the traps of the hard-luck memoir, she should acquaint herself with some of the best writers working today. Mary Karr’s subjects—addiction, a circus-like upbringing, hard-partying friends—will undoubtedly echo with Lohan. But it’s her style that is unique, her blend of humor and bracing honesty, the refusal to lay the blame on others, the attempt to use stories to empathize with her foes and not to settle scores or to merely absolve herself—these are the authorial attributes that Karr can teach Lohan, the writer. Perhaps reading Karr will make Lohan understand that a person is rarely either a victim or a perpetrator, but very often both. I’ve seen prison inmates gain this precise insight from reading Karr. In fact, I’ve gained it from them speaking about Karr.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue