Lori Jakiela is the adopted only child of a millwright and a nurse who believed work was work only if it showed in your hands. Jakiela�s father and mother have been dead many years, yet she goes on writing them the way writers do when they don�t say everything that needed saying in this life.

She�s been a bingo worker, a waitress, a journalist, a bartender, a sportswriter, a secretary, a Things Remembered key maker, a flight attendant, more.

Raised in Trafford, Pennsylvania, Jakiela left New York in 2000. Now she teaches writing at a university. She lives with her husband, the author Dave Newman, and their two children in the house she grew up in.

The author of three previous memoirs The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious, Miss New York Has Everything, and the award willing Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, as well as the poetry collection Spot the Terrorist. Jakiela writes �to figure things out, to connect the dots between all that beautiful strangeness.�