Sarah Addison Allen

I was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1971. It’s a strange, artsy, liberal city, birthplace of writer Thomas Wolfe. Dad was in the newspaper business. We moved up north for a few years when I was young, before moving back to Asheville, where Dad worked for the Asheville Citizen-Times and became an award-winning columnist. I went to college at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where I spent five years trying to figure out what to do. I finally graduated with a degree in literature.

I wrote my first book when I was sixteen, a very embarrassing futuristic romance, titled Once from Mood. I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life after graduating from college, but I’d always liked writing, so I started again with the goal of being published. I worked while I wrote—the Odd Job Years. I’ve shown merchandise at an auction house. I worked in retail where my job was to stand by the sweater table and look pleasant. I worked for a certified public accountant who liked to sleep on the couch among the clients in the waiting room after lunch.

I was an antiques appraiser’s assistant. In 2003 Harlequin Duets published my first novel, Tried and True, under the pen name Katie Gallagher. I have a short story in More Sweet Tea, an anthology of Southern fiction published by BelleBooks in 2005. And I’ll have another story in their next anthology, Sweeter Tea, scheduled for 2007.

Extra-crazy family stuff: Mom is from an old Southern family. She wore elbow-length gloves and had a bouffant. She married young, had children, was the perfect wife. Then, when she turned fifty, she dyed her hair red and had her nose pierced. I call her the Disowned Debutante.