Tiffany Baker

“Reads so fresh and unfolded in such surprising ways that I was captivated from start to finish. It’s a bracing, bright, masterful debut and Tiffany Baker is a writer to watch.” -Joshilyn Jackson, author of Gods in Alabama

Tiffany Baker is the author of the best-selling, critically acclaimed novel The Little Giant of Aberdeen County and she knows the recipe for the writing life. “Move from one to place to another up through your twenties. Add a graduate degree in creative writing from UC Irvine and then a PhD in Victorian literature for extra flavor, plus a smattering of tragic relationships. Move to New York to teach humanities, drink expensive cocktails, and give up on men.

Go hiking on Corsica with your mother. Meet your future husband. Move to England to be with him. Add the first child to the mix and marinate. Return to the US, to the town where you began. Wonder what you’re doing home again. Gradually, fold in one, additional child until life is thick and hard to stir.

Decide to write a novel. Get pregnant again in the meantime, but refuse to give up writing. Finish the novel and get rejected. Repeat as necessary until the mixture becomes glue-like and unappetizing. Finally, find the world’s most perfect agent who performs a miracle and sells your novel to the world’s best editor. Revise the novel many times, until it congeals. Do a victory dance.

Begin Book 2, having forgotten how hard writing a book is. Eat obsessive amounts of chocolate and decide what you’re doing isn’t half-bad. Gain an undisclosed amount of weight and take up jogging. Every day, take a long walk on the grassy ridge. Stop at the gum tree, breathing deeply. Stare across the hill at your house where your children and husband are. Hope your cypress tree isn’t really dying. Hope for enough rain in the coming season. Hope for world peace. Finally, really, really hope people enjoy your book. Hope they like the second one even more.”

Audiences and critics did indeed love The Little Giant of Aberdeen County – from a starred Publishers Weekly review to Good Housekeeping and Family Circle, Baker and her magical story have been compared to such writers as John Irving, Anne Tyler, and Margaret Atwood; to such classics as The Ugly Duckling; and even to Tim Burton’s acclaimed movie Big Fish. Sara Gruen, author of The New York Times best-seller Water for Elephants remarked, “Its charms are multitude – a wholly unique love story, a devastating friendship, a bewitching multi-generational history, all brought to an apex in the larger-than-life personage of Truly, a heroine simultaneously infused with a quite and dignified grace and peculiar sense of purpose. This dark-yet-rollicking debut is a must-read.”

At the podium, Baker discusses how to put her recipe for writing into action and how to bring characters as enormous as Truly to life. She also shares with audiences her personal views on the role of reading and writing fiction and its place in society, as well her favorite books, and other stories from the writer’s life.

Baker lives in Tiburon, California with her husband and three children. She just completed her second novel.