Gayle Forman
Author's Comment: When I was twelve, I wanted to be an actress. When I was eighteen, I wanted to be a traveller. When I was thirty, I wanted to be an author (though not yet a fiction writer). I think there’s a through line connecting all three, so stick with me. I gave up on acting when I realised that success depended on so much more than talent (which I didn’t have that much of to begin with). As for the thirty-year-old, she was about to go traveling around the world for a year, and she wanted to write a book about it. Which I wound up doing (my first book, a nonfiction travelogue called You Can’t Get There From Here, like my acting, isn’t that great). But after I came back from that trip and finished writing that book, I started writing fiction (more on that in the next question). I realised that I could continue to travel in my imagination (which was handy because now that I was a mother, going to places like India with my infant daughter wasn’t nearly as appealing) and also could tap into that old love of acting. I feel like when I write novels, I inhabit the characters, much the way an actor might, and it allows me to write them in a real immediate way. Acting. Traveling. Fiction Writing. Voila.
Nationality: American