ABOUT AVA
I was born in Los Angeles. One of my first memories is of looking out the window of the black Cadillac that my family drove across the wide-open desert when we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is where I grew up, and where my sister and I spent countless summer afternoons making fairy potions, battling evil witches, and playing other imaginary games that probably contributed to my proclivity to make up stories.
My first memory of writing is as a 2nd grader. I had been assigned to write a poem about the things I liked and why. I started out pretty unassumingly: “I like rainbows because they are pretty. I like kittens because they are soft.” And then I wrote, “I like my Mom—” but I couldn’t come up with an end to the sentence. I remember it vividly because it was my first awareness of that space between a feeling and the language we have to name it. No words were big enough. I finally settled on, “I like my Mom because she gave birth to me.” It was, in part, her life and her sudden, untimely death that inspired me to write my first book, Love Letters to the Dead.
After a lot of growing up (stories for another time), I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago (despite the motto “Where fun comes to die” I made some lifelong friendships there), and then received my MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, (where I lived on the bottom floor of a farm house once occupied by Kurt Vonnegut!). Upon graduating from Iowa, I moved to Los Angeles with aspirations of becoming a screenwriter. I had the good fortune to get a job working for Stephen Chbosky, the author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and became an associate producer on his film adaptation of the book. When I got up the guts to give him some of my writing, he said, “I think you should write a novel.” The idea had never occurred to me, but that night, on my drive home, I was staring absently at the half-full moon while waiting for a red light to change, and a title popped into my head: Love Letters to the Dead. I started writing the book that night.
While I was at work on my second book, In Search Of Us, I spent a lot of time wandering around different corners of Los Angeles with my headphones on, listening to James and Marilyn's music. I thought about my parents in this city, and felt as if I could cross paths with their ghosts—young and in love, and then beginning a family like my soon-to-be husband and I were about to.
I started working on Exposure around the same time I became pregnant. I remember heading to a coffee shop to try to pick up my writing again a couple of months after my daughter was born. I was in the fever dream of new motherhood, madly in love with my daughter, sleep deprived. I wrote a chapter about Jesse with her new baby, a version of which still exists in the book. When I finished it, my daughter was five and a half, and her little brother was turning two.
I now live with my husband and our two children in a lovely neighborhood just outside of LA, against the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. When I'm not writing, most of my time is spent with them collecting falls leaves, volunteering in my daughter’s kindergarten classroom, taking trips to the ocean, making homemade pizzas, cuddling. I also love to read (of course) and to hike, do yoga, binge watch TV, and go on dates with my husband to the movies (where I am always the one crunching on popcorn during the supposed-to-be-quiet moment). I love traveling, too. Since the publication of my first book, I've had the opportunity to visit Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, and many cities throughout the US. Whether in person or online, I've been blown away by the generosity of readers around the world. Thank you; getting to know you all has been an incredible joy and honor.
