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Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Family legend has it that the first time Lauren read anything, she was two and a half, and that it was the headlines of the New York Times. Implausible? Perhaps. But she's notorious in the city of Danbury for reading while walking—outside—so perhaps the legend has merit.

The world got its first inkling that Lauren was going to be a professional writer when she was 12 years old. Her poem, which began, "When we made love, I felt I was on fire," terrified the teachers in her private school, but they agreed she had a weird talent.

Lauren graduated from the University of Connecticut with a bachelor's degree in psychology, which she did absolutely nothing with, other than psychoanalyze her friends and family. Having been a doughnut salesperson during college, she then became a bookseller for 11 years, a book reviewer, a freelance editor and writer and a sort-of librarian.

In 1999, having been married for 10 years and having been sure she would never be pregnant, Lauren became pregnant. While home sick the first two months, the thought occurred to her: What if some insane person was making up all of these symptoms—the whole pregnancy, even? Thus was born The Thin Pink Line, a novel about a woman who makes the whole thing up. As Lauren so delicately puts it, "One trip to the bathroom with a pregnancy wand and I came out with two miracles: a book and Jackie."

Lauren still lives with her husband and daughter in Danbury, Connecticut, where she still writes and still reads.