Some doubt has since been cast on the degree to which he was 'allergic,' and while the husband is long gone, the hairless cats are here to stay. I married someone allegedly allergic to cats. In the last twenty years, I've written somewhere around a million words, and my thinly veiled autobiography would still be about aliens. I got married, had kittens, got divorced, bought a project house, and rescued a pair of boxers. Since then I've been working in academia, both teaching and pushing papers. After that I came home and wasted what were probably the prime years of my life demonstrating the correct way to put on a condom to high school students and a variety of social services audiences. I lived in Niigata Prefecture, where we got 45 feet of snow my first winter. Faced with the terrifying prospect of a PhD or reality, I chose reality.Īt any rate, I chose to take a teaching job in Japan. Somewhere in there, I got a BA in French Literature, a BA in English, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Over the years, we picked up my stepdad, my stepmom, and four more sisters, bringing the grand total of daughters to seven.Īt fifteen, I didn't so much drop out of high school to go to college as I ran away to escape the torments of prom and church youth groups. My mother was a teetotaler and my father was into a variety of recreational chemicals, so their marriage was probably doomed from the start. In the story's illustrations my older sister looks suspiciously like the Great Gazoo from The Flintstones. The first story I ever wrote in pre-school was a thinly veiled autobiography about a family of aliens.

Later I found out it really doesn't matter whether something's true, as long as it's a good story.

When I was little, my family often accused me of being a storyteller, which is a polite way in Kansas of calling someone a liar. Not even all the presidents, because Hugoton at the time was only ten blocks by ten blocks. They were gravel and named after presidents.

I grew up on the mean streets of Hugoton, Kansas, where the only traffic light in town went to flashing red at dusk. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Reckless Oath We Made, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, Last Will, and Lie Lay Lain. She earned a MA in Creative Writing from Kansas State University. BRYN GREENWOOD is a fourth-generation Kansan, one of seven sisters, and the daughter of a mostly reformed drug dealer.

Bryn greenwood