About the Authors
Cathi Hanauer
is the bestselling author of The
Bitch in the House and the author of several novels including My Sister’s Bones, Gone, and Sweet Ruin. She has
written articles, essays, reviews, and fiction for Elle, Mirabella,
Self, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and
many other magazines. She has been the monthly books columnist for both Glamour and Mademoiselle and
was the relationship advice columnist for Seventeen for
seven years. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, writer Daniel
Jones, and their daughter and son.
Hope Edelman is the author of five nonfiction books, including the bestsellers Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers. A graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, she has published articles, essays, and reviews in numerous magazines and anthologies. She lives in Topanga, California, with her husband and two daughters.
Pam Houston is the prize-winning author of Contents May Have Shifted, among other books. She is professor of English at the University of California-Davis and lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
Ellen Gilchrist is the critically acclaimed author of ten previous books, including the National Book Award–winning Victory Over Japan. She lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Natalie Angier writes about biology for the New York Times, where she has won a Pulitzer Prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science journalism award, and other honors. She is the author of The Beauty of the Beastly, Natural Obsessions, and Woman, named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, People, National Public Radio, Village Voice, and Publishers Weekly, among others.
Daphne Merkin, a former staff writer for the New Yorker, is a regular contributor to Elle. Her writing frequently appears in the New York Times, Bookforum, Departures, Travel & Leisure, W, Vogue, and other publications. Merkin has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount, and Hunter College. She lives in New York City.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, activist, and professor. Her work has been published in over fifty magazines, including The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and included in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her books have been translated into twenty-nine languages, and several have been used for campus-wide reads and made into films and plays. She teaches at the University of Houston.
Elissa Schappell is a
contributing editor at Vanity Fair where she writes the “Hot Type” book
column, a former senior editor of the
Paris Review, and co-founder and now editor-at-large of Tin House
magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.
Helen Schulman is the author of the novels A Day at the Beach, P. S., The Revisionist, and Out of Time, and the short-story collection Not a Free Show. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review. She is an associate professor of writing at the New School and lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
Kate Christensen is the author of seven novels, including The Great Man, which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She has also won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her essays, reviews, and short pieces have appeared in a wide variety of publications and anthologies.
Karen Karbo is the author of three novels, all of which were New York Times Notable Books; several nonfiction books, including The Stuff of Life, a People magazine Critic’s Choice; and a few books for young adults. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Outside, Elle, and Vogue.
Veronica Chambers is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed memoir Mama’s Girl and coauthor with Marcus Samuelsson of the New York Times bestseller Yes, Chef. She is also coauthor of Robin Roberts’ bestselling memoir, Everybody’s Got Something. A contributor to several anthologies, including the bestselling Bitch in the House, she has also been a senior editor at the New York Times Magazine, Glamour, and Newsweek. She is a JSK Knight Fellow at Stanford.
Catherine Newman is the author of children’s books, middle-grade books, adult novels, and two memoirs, as well as columns, articles, and essays. She edits the non-profit kids’ cooking magazine ChopChop and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and other publications.
Jill Bialosky is the author of novels, memoirs, and several poetry collections. Her History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life was named one of the ten best works of nonfiction by Entertainment Weekly. She is currently an editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City.
Laurie Abraham is a freelance writer, senior editor of Elle magazine, and the author of Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America. Formerly the executive editor of Elle, she has written for New York magazine, the New York Times, Mother Jones, and many other publications. Her work is also included in Best American Essays 2006, as well as the original collections The Bitch in the House, Maybe Baby, and The Secret Currency of Love. Abraham has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University and a master’s in law from Yale University.
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. As a young teenager, he became quite well known in Odense as a reciter of drama and as a singer. When he was fourteen, he set off for the capital, Copenhagen, determined to become a national success on the stage. He failed miserably, but made some influential friends in the capital who got him into school to remedy his lack of proper education. In 1829 his first book was published. After that, books came out at regular intervals. His stories began to be translated into English as early as 1846. Since then, numerous editions, and more recently Hollywood songs and Disney cartoons, have helped to ensure the continuing popularity of the stories in the English-speaking world.