from my own life for my novels. In Say Goodnight, Gracie,
for example, Morgan and Jimmy attend Glenbard West,
my old high school. And like Morgan, I studied acting and
improv comedy at Chicago's Second City theater:
(Studying acting is great training for a writer.)
When I was a teenager, I entered Seventeen Magazine's
Annual Fiction Contest and won an honorable mention for
one of my short stories. That was all the encouragement I
needed to start sending my stories to the magazine.
Although Seventeen never accepted any of my stories for
publication, the fiction editor sent me wonderful letters
telling me to keep writing, and I did.
Because I loved comedy, I became interested in writing
for television and worked on a situation comedy called
Adam's Rib:
I loved writing scripts, but then I discovered the world of
young adult fiction, and fell in love with the genre. While I
was learning the craft of writing novels, I worked as a
teacher's aide and as a freelance artist for magazines like
The New Yorker and Reader's Digest.
I still enjoy painting and drawing as a hobby, but these
days I prefer to spend most of my time writing.
My first novel was Say Goodnight, Gracie. The book
started out as a short story that Seventeen Magazine
rejected, but when I sent it to a book publisher, a
wonderful editor and writer, Nancy Jewell Geller,
encouraged me to expand it into a novel. Say Goodnight,
Gracie was published in 1988 and over the years has
been used in grief counseling by mental health
professionals to help kids and adults who've experienced
loss. The 20th Anniversary Edition of Say Goodnight,
Gracie will soon be published by HarperCollins.
After Say Goodnight, Gracie was published, readers
asked for a new book that would focus on Dr. Hackett
(Morgan's aunt) and her work as a psychiatrist, and so I
created Jamie as a troubled young woman who comes to
the doctor for help in The Night I Disappeared. Morgan
plays a supporting role as a friend to Jamie in this book. If
you get a chance to read The Night I Disappeared, please
let me know if you guessed the surprise twist at the end!
You can contact me by clicking the e-mail link above, or
by sending e-mail to me at JulieDeaver@aol.com. I love to
hear from my readers and I do my best to answer
everyone who writes to me.
For more details on a writer's life, please click on the FAQ
link above. Clicking on the images above will take you to
corresponding websites.
Biography
I was born and raised in Glen Ellyn,
Illinois. I've always known that I
wanted to be a writer and I've
written all my life. I grew up in a very
creative family. My mother was an
novels, including the popular Lincoln Rhyme
series. I can never guess the ending of my
brother's books because they are packed
all the time, although it took many years
(and many rejections) before our novels
were finally published.
Sometimes readers ask me if my books
are based on things that have really happened to me.
Although the stories are fictional, I borrow a lot of details
artist and homemaker, and my father was an
advertising writer. My brother, Jeffery Deaver,
is also an author. He writes best-selling
with so many plot twists and turns! Even
when Jeffery and I were kids, we wrote