My Bio:

Carolyn Mackler is the author of the popular teen novels, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things (A Michael L. Printz Honor Book), Tangled, Guyaholic, Vegan Virgin Valentine, and Love and Other Four-Letter Words. Carolyn’s most recent novel, The Future of Us, co-written with bestselling author Jay Asher, has received starred reviews, and the film rights have been sold to Warner Brothers. Carolyn's novels have been published in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Denmark, Israel, and Indonesia.

Carolyn has contributed to anthologies for teens, including Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories. She has a short story in Thirteen, edited by James Howe, and in Sixteen, edited by Megan McCafferty. In 2008, Carolyn was a judge for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Carolyn lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons. She is currently at work on her seventh novel.

My Life Story:

I was born in Manhattan, on Friday, July 13, 1973. When I was one, my parents moved us from Greenwich Village to Syracuse and then to Brockport, which is a small village in Western New York (and the setting for many of my novels and stories). I did K-12 at Brockport Central School District. Things were okay from kindergarten through fourth grade, when I lived in a creative oblivion, building tree forts, riding my bike, and starting a newspaper with my best friend.

This is me, at four, playing dress-up


Here’s me hanging out in a homemade house. My parents used to let me keep these up for weeks at a time!


Stephie and me, summer after sophomore year

From the beginning, I loved to read and write. When I was four, I would tell stories into a tape recorder (I still have the tapes!). I also dictated stories to my mom. She’d write down my words, I’d color the pictures, and then she’d stitch them together. I read obsessively. My first real chapter book was The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. From there, I read every book I could get my hands on – the Beverly Cleary books, the Judy Blume books, The Great Gilly Hopkins, Tuck Everlasting, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Girl with the Silver Eyes, Homecoming, the Great Brain books. Sometimes I felt like I lived in those worlds more than my own. But it was okay. In elementary school, people didn’t catch on that I lived in fiction more than reality.

In fifth grade, everything changed. I was going through this phase of wearing plaid boarding-school dresses, my hair in long braids and ribbons. But suddenly, as if there were a special summit to which I was not invited, all the other girls started wearing cute lavender tops, designer jeans, feathered hair. I was still playing with dolls – and they were spending their time gossiping, whispering, and clustering together in the school yard. It was official: I was a misfit.

Needless to say, junior high sucked. It helped that my parents loved me even though sometimes, at home, I wore a straw flowerpot on my head. Also, I had a best friend, Stephie, who lived three doors down. Stephie was a year younger than me, so we weren’t together in school. But the second we got home, we were inseparable. We played violin together. We wrote notes on balloons and released them in a giant field near our houses. We took vacations with each other’s families. Sometimes, on a warm summer morning, I’d carry my cereal through the two backyards separating our houses, and Stephie and I would eat breakfast together. Even though my school life was awful, my home life was happy, much thanks to Stephie’s friendship.

Things got better in high school. Stephie started hanging around with some boys. That meant, by default, I got to hang around them, too. My parents took me on a shopping spree and I picked out some clothes that might help me fit in a little better. I joined ski club. I got my first boyfriend. I became obsessed with George Michael’s Faith album. I started putting together a group of friends and, at some point along the way, my confidence bounced back from its all-time junior high low. Sophomore year, I made friends with Jen, who had long blond hair and drove a black Trans Am. Senior year, I met a wannabe rock star on an airplane and he wrote a song for me. I got cast in the school musical. I fell in love for the first time and, yes, I had my heart broken for the first time, too.

Even so, I was still haunted by those feelings of being a misfit. Things looked okay on the surface, but I often felt like no one really understood what was going on in my head. That’s where I turned to young adult novels. I read and re-read all the Judy Blume books. I read A Summer to Die so many times I can still remember passages by heart. I devoured every other book by Lois Lowry. I loved the M.E. Kerr books because the characters often seemed so alone and I could relate to that. And the Norma Klein books. And, actually, every other YA novel I could find in the Seymour Library.

At fifteen, sneaking in a book between my knees

People often ask me now why I write novels for teenagers. Lots of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that I honestly believe that, along with certain friendships, I was saved by the books I read during those years. They spoke to me in a way that nothing else did. They helped me feel less alone. They made me laugh. They made me feel like there was a world bigger than my high school.

In the fall of 1991, I went to Vassar College and majored in Art History. I worked in a café on campus, which I loved. The summer after my freshmen year, I went bicycling through Europe with a friend. The summer after my sophomore year, while I was on a hiking trip in Utah, my parents split up. I got the news when I called them from a hotel in Salt Lake City. I remember sitting on the staircase, sobbing, feeling like my childhood was over. I started out junior year lost and confused, but then I spent a semester in Paris, where I met Jenny, one of my best friends in the world. Jenny and I spent five months talking nonstop and, by the time I returned to the United States, I was a new person. As I said, friendships have saved my life, over and over again.

After I graduated from college, I had no idea what to do with my life. I’d been keeping a journal since I was fourteen, and I’d also begun writing poetry and short stories. So I thought maybe I’d like to write novels. But how do you even begin? Jenny told me she was going to move to Seattle and get a job at a restaurant and experience real life a little bit. I decided to follow her. I bought a used seafoam green Toyota Tercel and drove cross-country by myself, camping and staying in youth hostels the whole way across. Jenny and I got an apartment and jobs in Seattle, but after a few months, I was restless. I missed the east coast.

I drove back to New York City in December 1995. It was cold and gray and wet. I put together a resume. I went on job interviews. No one would hire me. I temped for a lawyer. I licked envelopes for a nonprofit organization. I slept on my mom’s futon and pounded the pavement, hoping something would click. Finally, the following spring, I landed an internship at Ms. Magazine. From there, I began learning more about the writing business. I wrote some (very small) articles. And, over the next few years, I wrote larger articles for Ms. and for other magazines. All along, I still wanted to write young adult novels. So in the fall of 1997, I took a class at NYU called “Beginning Your Novel.” It was in this class that I began a first draft of Love and Other Four-Letter Words. For the next year and a half, as I struggled to pay rent by writing magazine articles, I worked on this story whenever I could.

Finally, in the spring on 1999, I sold Love and Other Four-Letter Words to Random House Children’s Books! I cannot even begin to describe how much I began hyperventilating when I hear the news. Love and Other Four-Letter Words came out in 2000, the same year I began dating Jonas.

Here's Jonas and me, right before we got married

In 2003, Jonas and I got married AND my second book came out.The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things went on to win the Printz Honor (insert more hyperventilating here). The following year, I published Vegan Virgin Valentine, and our beautiful son was born a few months after that. It took me a while to figure out how to write and be a mom at the same time, but finally I (somehow, sort of) achieved a balance and Guyaholic came out in 2007. My second son was born in November 2009 and then my fifth novel for teenagers, Tangled, came out six weeks later. Jonas called these two events my dual births.  Somehow, in the midst of raising two kids and being my usual overextended self, I co-wrote a novel with bestselling author Jay Asher.  We had an amazing time writing The Future of Us.   Co-writing was key here because whenever I finished my chapter I had a few days off while Jay wrote his!

My life now is relatively calm. I live with my husband and our sons in a lovely apartment in Manhattan. Every morning, Jonas goes to his office, our older son goes to school, and (on the days I have a sitter for our toddler) I work on my next story. My desk is situated in a corner of our bedroom, near the windows. As I’m writing, I often rotate my chair toward the windows, which overlook the rooftops and water towers of the Upper West Side. I’m still enchanted by New York City and how, in this city of misfits, I’ve finally found a place where I belong.