Events | Jennie Nash

ABOUT ME

Hi! This is me, sitting in the gorgeous garden of my friend, Peggy. Can you see the ocean in the background? It's there -- the cove of Portugese Bend, in Palos Verdes, California. I live just around the bend (sort of) in Torrance. I don't live in either a 1928 bungalow OR a modern glass house with bamboo floors. Those houses came out of my imagination -- and from going on bungalow tours in historic Pasadena, which is something I heartily recommend if you've never done it. I do, however, live in a house with very brightly colored walls like my character, Peg (no relation to the aforementioned Peggy.) My office is a soft pumpkin. My kitchen is crowne yellow. My bedroom is a mossy green. There are, in fact, no white walls in my house, unless you count the closets, which I don't. The Last Beach Bungalow is my first novel, and it has been a thrill to publish it. I've written three other books of narrative non-fiction, but two things happened to cause the genre switch: 1.) I got tired of writing about myself. The constraints of reality were starting to bind too tightly and 2.) I had a revelation one day on a big stage in Anchorage, Alaska. I had travelled there to give the keynote address at a breast cancer event (because one of my previous books was a breast cancer memoir -- The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming and Other Lessons I Learned From Breast Cancer.) There were women there from all over the state. The year before, they had been treated to a keynote address by Dr. Susan Love, breast cancer guru. During the lunch, all I could think about was what I could possibly say that Dr. Love hadn't. Why, out of all those women in that room, was I the one going onto the stage? As I made my way up, I realized that it wasn't WHAT I had to say that mattered. It was HOW I was going to say it. I realized, in other words, that I was a storyteller. I am almost done with my second novel, which will come out from Berkley Books next year. And my antennae are out for an idea for novel #3. I feel so very grateful to be an 8-year cancer survivor. These 8 years with my sweet husband and our amazing kids have been like a whole world. If you or someone you know has survived anything -- be it cancer, life with a kindergartner, or traffic on the 405 -- than cheers! And I hope you enjoy my story.

Official Author Bio

Jennie Nash first began writing essays as a student at Wellesley College, where she wrote the column “On and Off Campus” for the alumnae magazine. As she worked toward a degree in English, she developed a series of essays about her friendship with her roommate, which she later turned into an honors thesis entitled Two Women in Particular. Ms. Nash graduated cum laude from Wellesley in 1986. After graduation, Ms. Nash moved to New York City, where she worked as an editorial assistant at Ballantine Books and an assistant editor at New York Woman magazine. She began her freelance writing career while working on these editorial staffs. Her personal essays and articles have appeared in dozens of national magazines, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Real Simple, Self, Shape, Child, Glamour, Mademoiselle, GQ, US, Home, Working Woman, New York Woman, and Readers’ Digest. In addition, her marketing and advertising copy has been used on products by clients such as Mattel, Fischer-Price, Knowledge Adventure, Ford Motor Company and the Los Angeles ad agency, Roddan Paolucci Roddan. In 1992, Ms. Nash’s collection of essays, Altared States: Surviving the Engagement, was published by Crown. It was excerpted in Cosmopolitan magazine. Ms. Nash’s second book, The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming and Other Lessons I Learned From Breast Cancer (Scribner, October 2001; Plume Paperback, October 2002) is the story of how the illness made her “a wise old woman at the age of 36.” The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming was a LifetimeTV Bookshelf Pick for October, 2001 and was featured in prominent ads in six major Hearst women’s magazines. Ms. Nash has appeared on several major talk shows, including the Rosie O’Donnell Show. She has taught WebMD classes on illness and storytelling, and is a popular keynote speaker at breast cancer events throughout the country. Ford Motor Company purchased 110,000 copies of The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming to use as giveaways in their national education outreach campaign, for which Ms. Nash waived her royalties. Ford also toured her to major cities to lecture and sign books during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 2002, and hired her to write a short work of fiction, entitled My Grandma’s Bandana, which was given away at Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure events in 2003 and 2004. Ms. Nash’s third book, Raising a Reader: A Mother’s Tale of Desperation and Delight was published by St. Martin’s Press in August, 2003. It was a BookSense76 pick for September/October, and was awarded a Gold Medal from the National Association of Parenting Publications. Ms. Nash is an instructor at the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program.