Jennie’s Books for Writers


Jennie’s Fiction and Memoir

Fiction & Memoir by Jennie Nash

  • I wrote my first memoir — Altared States: Surviving the Engagement — when I was 25 years old. It’s cringy to read now that I’m in my late ‘50s but it’s the book that started my career and so I love it. Crown, a division of Random House, published it, and it was excerpted in Brides and Cosmopolitan.

  • The Victoria’s Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming (And Other Lessons I Learned From Breast Cancer) has more than 100,000 copies in print thanks to a three-year promotional campaign I did with Ford Motor Company and Komen Race for the Cure.

  • Raising a Reader is a sweet memoir about my desperation to have children who loved to read. It’s a bit confused — is it self-help? Memoir? — which is part of the learning that transformed me into a book coach.

  • I began writing fiction with a book about a cancer survivor who falls in love with a house. The Last Beach Bungalow was such a thrill to write. I did a promotional tie-in with Benjamin Moore paints that was one of the highlights of my career. We had a blast doing book talks in paint stores all over California and the Pacific Northwest.

  • The Only True Genius in the Family is a story about creativity, expectation, and raising your voice — a topic that has been close to my heart forever. The family in the novel are visual artists because watching someone write is about as boring as it gets.

  • The Threadbare Heart is a story that is also about creativity, expectation, and raising your voice. It gets into love and loss like The Last Beach Bungalow too. It features a fabric collector who lives on an avocado farm in the hills of Santa Barbara, my hometown.

  • Perfect Red was a book I wrote to try to break out of the midlist. I wanted to write a big, juicy “book club” book and I studied the books that were in that rarefied air to see what they were doing that I wasn’t doing. I tried to “copy” that and although the book is good and I am proud of it, it is not my favorite. It was not the favorite of the publishing industry, either. What happened to it is a long, sort of sad story that ended with my self-publishing it — and doing a poor job of that. The very good news, though, is that this is the book that made me into a great book coach, which is how I now make a living and where I find so much joy.