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.