All the Finest Girls
by Alexandra Styron

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0316120863
Publisher: Back Bay Books

I was born just before Halloween, 1966, in New Haven, Connecticut, the last of Rose and William Styron's four children. My closest sibling, brother Tom, is seven years older than I. So I am that peculiar hybrid: only child in a large family. Most of my childhood was spent in a very small town in northwestern Connecticut, where I was a devoted horseback rider and a indifferent student.

After graduating from boarding school, I went to Barnard College, receiving a B.A. in theater in 1987. For many years I was a struggling actress in New York, co-founded a theater company, and kept afloat working as a receptionist, personal trainer, and SAT coach (only the verbal section!). In my mid-twenties, I spent three dispiriting years in Los Angeles where I learned a great deal about what I was not and began at last to write seriously. A encouraging workshop teacher urged me to go to graduate school and become a writer full-time. Packing my bags, I returned east and enrolled in Columbia University's writing program. There I began my first novel, All the Finest Girls, finishing the book two years after receiving my MFA.

I still live in New York, with my fiance and my old Yellow Lab, though I manage to escape nearly half the year to Massachusetts and the rolling Atlantic. I am just beginning work on my second book.

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