All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (Greenwood) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1970-71
• Where—Hugoton, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Kansas State University
• Currently—lives in Lawrence, Kansas


Bryn Greenwood is an American writer of essays, short stories, and novels. The latter includes, Last Will (2012), Lie Lay Lain (2014), and All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (2016).

Like her heroine Wavy in her 2016 novel, Greenwood grew up in Kansas. One of seven sisters (the result of a blended family), her mother was a teetotaler, and her father a meth dealer, who ran one of the largest meth production and distribution businesses in the Midwest. Had meth been legal, she told KCUR Radio in Kansas City, he would haven been a billionaire. In another interview, she recalled...

He had a private plane and pilot, and there was always money except when there wasn’t. The money is like a faucet that’s turned on full blast for 10 minutes and then it’s turned off. And you wait for the next time the faucet is turned on.

When you have that kind of business, you have just hordes of hangers-on, an endless rotation of people going through your existence because they want to use you or they want to benefit from you or they’re just there for the drugs. So yeah, [my father's] life was a little crazy. (Kansas City Star).

Her parents divorced when Bryn was two; she lived mostly with her mother and with her fraternal grandparents. In the summers she spent time with her father—but that ended when she was 14, and he was sent to jail.

Also, like her heroine Wavy, Greenwood had a much older boyfriend: she was 13 and he 28. Because the novel's depiction of Wavy and Kellen's romance, Greenwood has received a fair amount of criticism from readers—even those who haven't read her book. When comparisons are made to Lolita, she noted that while Nabokov's book was written to make readers uncomfortable, that was not her purpose:

I didn’t intend at all for my book to shock or titillate. I’m more of the mind that: There are people who’ve lived this life, I have lived portions of this life, and they don’t see it in fiction (KCUR radio).

Greenwood discovered books early on and knew she wanted to write. Her first story came when she was four: she had to dictate it to one of her sisters. Years later, Greenwood went on to college and, eventually, to grad school where she earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Kansas State University. She taught English in Japan for a while, returned to the U.S., and finally landed in Lawrence, Kansas, where she is now a college teacher and administrator.

She married, got divorced, bought a house (a work in progress), and lives with her hairless cats and adopted dogs. (Author bio by LitLovers.)