Small Indiscretion (Ellison)

Author Bio
• Birth—1965-66
• Raised—Tujunga, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., San Francisco State University
• Awards—O. Henry Prize
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California


Jan Ellison is the author of the debut novel, A Small Indiscretion, which was both a San Francisco Chronicle Book Club Pick and an Oprah Editor’s Pick. Jan’s essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere, and her first story to appear in print won a 2007 O. Henry Prize.

Jan grew up in Los Angeles, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband of twenty years and their four children. When her children were small, she spent seven years taking classes at San Francisco State and finally earned her MFA. She had a brief career in her twenties at a Silicon Valley startup, marketing risk management software to derivatives traders. The company went public, Jan became a mother, and instead of leaning in she leaned out, became a stay-at-home mom, and began to write.

Before that, Jan abandoned a job in investment banking before she even started it to spend two years waitressing in Hawaii, temping in Australia, and backpacking through Southeast Asia. Her college days were spent at Stanford, where a degree in History taught her about stories, as did her creative writing classes. She left Stanford for a year at nineteen to live on a shoestring in Paris and work in an office in London. She scribbled notes on yellow legal pads, and years later those notes provided the inspiration for her debut novel. (From the author's website.)

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