About the Author

Is it redundant to write a biography here when I've already written two memoirs? I should probably just say, "[Please see books above.]"

But since we're here:

I was born in New York City, just a few blocks from where I live today. At age 15, I was forced to leave my mentally ill mother's volatile home, and I lived at a shelter for homeless teenagers, then at a group home for bad girls, then with a boyfriend on the Lower East Side. I engaged in typical bad-girl behavior during high school (drugs, sex, lying, cheating, stealing, truancy, more drugs, generally being a jerk) , much of which is detailed in my first book, GIRLBOMB: A Halfway Homeless Memoir.

I graduated from my NYC public high school and went on to study Writing at Hunter College. During college, several memoir pieces of mine were published in the alternative weekly New York Press, and I started participating in poetry slams - that's me on the cover of the anthology ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café.

I also toured with Lollapalooza as a performance poet (see REVIVAL: Spoken Work from Lollapalooza '94) , contributed to the feminist magazine BUST (see THE BUST GUIDE TO THE NEW GIRL ORDER) , and appeared on MTV's "Sex in the '90s," pretending to be a lesbian (see YouTube, if you must) .

In the meantime, I was researching future memoirs by having terrible relationships with men, toxic friendships with women, and a crazy mother.

There was also a lot of therapy. A LOT.

Ten years later, I was in a stable relationship and a nice apartment and a good place in my life, so I decided to try to wreck it by going back to the shelter where I'd lived as a teenager and volunteering. I got way too enmeshed with one of the residents there, and spent a year of my life in a co-dependent frenzy trying to "save" her, before discovering her insane secret. (Please see my second book, HAVE YOU FOUND HER, for the full story/insane secret.)

Today in late 2014, I remain in a stable relationship and a nice apartment and a good place in my life. I also remain in therapy. It's not a coincidence.

My new novel, I, LIAR, is a work of fiction, but it deals with many of the same real-life issues I've written about in my two memoirs: Addiction, obsession, self-harm, mental illness, women's psychology, fictional lives. It's got competitive women's friendships, crazy moms, and a narrator who may or may not be pretending to be a lesbian. In fact, one of the titles I considered for the book was FAKE BITCH.

I decided to keep that one for Memoir Number Three.