Discover the 8 books that inspired Lorde’s music and lyrics

When she turned 20, Lorde shared A Note from the Desk of a Newly Born Adult on Facebook. In just a few lines, the artist reflected on the fleeting nature of adolescence, the uncertainty of the future and the weight of the passing of time. Beyond her music, that note confirmed something essential: Lorde is a writer as well as a singer.

Her literary sensibility is no accident. She grew up surrounded by books thanks to her mother, the poet Sonya Yelich, who never limited her reading and encouraged her to mix children’s literature with adult texts. That early exposure gave her an ear for cadence, rhythm, and image construction, elements that define her lyrics today.

Over the years, Lorde has left traces of her reading in newsletters, interviews, Instagram posts and even in Lorde’s Book Club, an account that archives her books as if they were pieces of a secret map. Over time, fans have tracked these clues to discover the eight most influential books in her lyrical universe.

1. Trick Mirror — Jia Tolentino

Random House, 2019
One of the most incisive voices in contemporary journalism dissects the mirages of the digital age in this volume. Its nine essays analyse the culture of self-optimisation, screen addiction and the illusion of freedom in a system that demands we constantly reinvent ourselves.

Lorde found inspiration here for ‘Mood Ring’ (Solar Power), a song that satirises wellness spirituality, the consumption of ‘alternative’ therapies, and the empty desire to be an ever healthier, more productive, and happier version of ourselves. Tolentino’s book functions as a critical X-ray; Lorde turns it into a pop song of delicate irony.

2. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion

FSG Classics, 1968
Joan Didion is probably the most cited writer when it comes to Lorde. Her collection of essays accurately captures the disorientation of youth in late 1960s California. Themes such as identity, loss of innocence and the search for meaning run through every page.

During her 2021 tour, Lorde projected one of the quotes from this book onto a screen before singing “Supercut”. Didion wrote about the longing for transcendence and human fragility, obsessions that Lorde shares in Melodrama, where heartbreak and the transition to adulthood are narrated with the same mixture of harshness and beauty.

3. Los años — Annie Ernaux

Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2008
Instead of just telling her personal story, Annie Ernaux constructs a collective memory in The Years. Through photos, memories and objects, she tells the story of France from the 1940s to 2000. Her writing blurs the individual self to integrate it into a social and generational “we”.

Lorde has acknowledged that this was the first book she read by Ernaux and that it marked a turning point in her writing. In Virgin, her most recent project, we find echoes of this choral perspective: songs such as ‘Shapeshifter’ and ‘Broken Glass’ function as generational testimonies, not just personal confessions. Ernaux taught her that individual memory is always intertwined with collective memory.

4. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint — Maggie Nelson

Graywolf Press, 2021
Maggie Nelson examines the concept of freedom from four angles: art, sex, drugs, and climate. For her, freedom is never absolute; it is always exercised in relation to others, traversed by care, conflict, and interdependence.

Lorde shared a photo of this book in her newsletter in 2021, confirming its importance in that creative moment. In songs like ‘Clearblue,’ that influence is evident: reflections on autonomy, pregnancy, loneliness, and independence in the face of family ties. Nelson offers Lorde a theoretical framework for the question that runs through her entire career: what does it mean to be free in a world that always conditions us?

5. My Phantoms — Gwendoline Riley

Granta Books, 2021
This novel portrays the complicated relationship between a daughter and her mother with dark humour and rawness. Riley explores discomfort, emotional distance and the impossibility of complete reconciliation. There are no great catharsis, only the persistence of difficult bonds.

Lorde has addressed the mother-daughter relationship in several songs, most notably in ‘Favourite Daughter.’ In My Phantoms, she found a mirror of those family tensions: the mixture of love, frustration, and strangeness that defines many intimate bonds.

6. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments — Roland Barthes

Penguin, 1977
A fundamental text of literary theory turned into a fragmented diary about love. Barthes analyses romantic language as if dissecting a system of symbols, but he does so from the vulnerability of someone torn apart by waiting, obsession and desire.

Before disappearing from social media in 2018, Lorde tweeted about this book, acknowledging its personal relevance. The idea of love as a space of endless waiting resonates with songs like ‘Liability,’ where the artist shows herself to be fragile, aware of her own loneliness in the dynamics of love.

7. Autumn / Winter — Ali Smith

Penguin, 2016-2017
Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet turns the seasons into political and emotional metaphors. Autumn was described as the first great Brexit novel; Winter, as a chilling portrait of fragmented families and frozen landscapes.

Lorde uses nature with the same symbolic intention. In Solar Power, summer is freedom, warmth and rebirth; in Melodrama, nights and storms embody emotional chaos. The connection with Smith is clear: both turn the weather and the seasons into metaphors for collective human states.

8. La sociedad del espectáculo — Guy Debord

Éditions Buchet-Chastel, 1967
The French philosopher described how the media and consumerism transform social life into a spectacle, where reality is degraded in favour of representation. Decades later, Lorde shared this title on Instagram and incorporated it into her reflection on fame.

In Solar Power, the artist talks about withdrawing from celebrity culture, disappearing from social media and seeking authenticity away from constant exposure. Debord’s echo is evident: life as media spectacle is, for Lorde, a trap from which she tries to escape.

These eight books form a map of Lorde’s literary obsessions: memory and the passage of time (Ernaux, Didion), intimate and family relationships (Riley, Barthes), freedom and its limits (Nelson), nature as an emotional metaphor (Smith), and criticism of contemporary culture (Tolentino, Debord). Her music, always rich in imagery and narrative, draws directly from these readings.

After four years of silence, Lorde returned with Virgin, an album that is already beginning to generate a universe of its own beyond the official tracklist.