Comes in handy occasionally, like at cocktail parties.) I’d been on the five-and-a-half year college plan, and when I graduated my parents were hoping I’d settle down and get a Real Job so they could stop worrying about me. (Which means I can quote small parts of many Great Works. I attended college at UNC, where I studied creative writing and graduated with a degree in English. It makes it hard to leave high school behind entirely, which is a good or bad thing depending on what day you ask me. Also it doesn’t hurt to still be living in my hometown, where it’s a given that I’ll bump into people I had homeroom with, or guys I had big crushes on, while I’m pumping gas or buying stamps.

I’m still close with my friends from that time, so it’s never very hard to put myself back into that place, that voice. 'In high school, I was lucky enough to have a big group of girlfriends that have really inspired a lot of the stories in my books.

Once you learn how to make a story better, it’s hard not to do it all the time. I was the kind of kid that people always sighed over and said, 'She has such a wild imagination,' which usually meant 'I wish Sarah would try to stick to the truth.' I have a tendency to embellish: I think it’s just a weakness of fiction writers. When I was eight or nine my parents gave me an old manual typewriter and a little desk in the corner of our den, and I’d sit there and type up my stories. I used to get frustrated with my mom because she bought me books for Christmas when what I really wanted were the gifts my friends got, things like sweaters and jewelry. I was always a big reader, mostly because my parents were. 'I’ve been writing, in one way or another, for as long as I can remember. My parents were both professors at the University of North Carolina: my mom is a classicist (which means she knows everything you could ever imagine about myths, Latin, and words) and my dad teaches Shakespeare (which means I’d seen As You Like It about five times by the age of 18.) I have one brother, who is a musician and lives in California with his son and his wife, an artist who designed my personal website. 'I was born in 1970 in Illinois, but all the life I remember I’ve spent in Chapel Hill, NC.

Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen