Katie Coyle

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Katie Coyle grew up in a small suburban town in New Jersey. The first story she ever wrote was about a girl with a pet dolphin – eventually the dolphin turned into a dog, and the third-person narration unceremoniously switched over to first-person. The story was never finished. However, since then, she has spent countless hours dreaming up tales about the weird and wonderful things that happen to teenage girls. She has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, and spends her free time buying books she doesn't need and crying at science-fiction television shows.



Author's Comment: I first started writing Vivian as a short story a few years ago, around the time of the last widely publicized Rapture prediction. I hadn't paid much attention to it, but the morning after the Rapture didn't happen, my husband handed me the newspaper article he was reading and said, "This sounds like one of your stories." The article was a slightly jokey story about a family of about five—the parents believed that the Rapture was coming and the kids, who were all teenagers, didn't. I don't really remember much besides that, except that the youngest child noted that the weirdest thing about the situation was that his parents didn't make him do his homework anymore, because they thought the world was about the end and he was about to end with it. It was a totally bizarre story but I was so struck by that detail—how shocking and strange it would be to force yourself to grow up under those circumstances, where your parents are convinced you're not going to get the chance to grow up. I had written basically the first chapter of the book under the assumption that it was a short story, and it was only after I got to the final image—of Vivian seeing the holes in her parents’ ceiling, through which they've presumably ascended—that I realized it was going to be much bigger than I'd anticipated.

Nationality: American