BIO

The quick-and-dirty:

Becca Fitzpatrick's first book, Hush, Hush, debuted as a New York Times bestseller. She graduated college with a degree in health, which she promptly abandoned for storytelling. When not writing, she's most likely running, prowling sale racks for shoes, or fulfilling her mission to taste every flavor of ice cream under the sun. She lives in Colorado, the lone girl in a house filled with boys.

The nitty-gritty:

My love for telling stories started in kindergarten. I was not a big fan of kindergarten. I'll even go so far as to say I hated it. My older sister, Heather, attended third grade at the same elementary school in Centerville, Utah, and shared my feelings for school. It wasn't that we disliked school so much as we disliked a handful of kids who went there: Think mini Mean Girls. At night when we were supposed to be sleeping, Heather and I would make up new episodes in an ongoing tale called THE BUS ADVENTURES. The stories were usually morbid tales of us locking all the mean kids on the school bus and driving it over a cliff. (We always let the bus driver off first—we liked him.)

The summer before I entered second grade, my family moved to North Platte, Nebraska, and I warmed up to school. I also discovered Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. Heather and I kept flashlights under our beds and our nights were spent reading about the mysterious and frightening adventures of our favorite girl sleuths. Eventually Heather grew up and needed her own bedroom, and I moved in with my younger sister, Christian, who introduced me to Roald Dahl. I loved books more than ever, and found myself split between the zany imaginative world of Roald Dahl, the spine-tingling world of Nancy Drew and the historical adventure of the Little House on the Prairie books.

Everything came to a crux in third grade when I watched Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. There was no turning back: I knew I wanted to be an author. Of course, I thought all authors flew to Colombia to rescue their sister from Bad Guys, hunted for treasure, and fell in love with a sexy dangerous guy in crocodile boots, a.k.a. Michael Douglas.

I have a lot of vivid memories from my high school years, which probably explains why I write YA. I ran cross-country, played clarinet in the marching band and was a member of VICA and National Honor Society. I'll let you make the call as to whether I was a nerd. My sophomore year, a friend blackmailed me to try out for the basketball team, and I still remember the coach telling me (through clenched teeth) that due to the unbelievably low number of girls trying out that year...I survived the cut. Everyone did. I think he actually thought I coveted a spot on the team. The truth is, I hated every minute of those three-hour practices. And to this day, I resent the coach telling me I looked like I was dancing when I was on the court. Coach: It's called shuffling. Thankfully, I was much better at academics than at sports, and I graduated valedictorian of my class in 1997.

I always held on to my dream of writing, but went through a phase in college where I wanted to be a spy. I stalked the CIA website and filled out at least a dozen applications. I thought being a spy was dangerous and sexy. I didn't want to be the girl who got a degree, only to settle down and do house-ish things...like answer telemarketers' calls and choose between Spanish or Ladybug Red for the kitchen walls.

In December 2000, I married my Philadelphia-native husband, Justin. In April 2001, I graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Community Health and went to work as a secretary-slash-teacher-slash-accountant at an alternative high school in Provo, Utah. I loved the students at the school, but having the principal call me in on Saturdays to operate the copy machine was a different matter. In February 2003, my husband surprised me by enrolling me in a writing class for my twenty-fourth birthday. On that day, I went from the girl who wrote stories daily in the privacy of her journal, to the girl who wrote stories and shared them with people outside of the worlds in her head. It was also in that class that I started writing HUSH, HUSH.

Five years, one baby, and one move to Colorado later, I had a book, and it was just about as sexy and dangerous as the spy-life I'd always dreamed about.

In June 2008 I found my agent, Catherine Drayton, and in September 2008 she sold the book to Simon & Schuster.

--Becca

P.S. I recently painted my kitchen walls Spanish Red. Oh, and the telemarketers? Three calls today and counting...

 

Becca in 1980, age 1