If You've Ever Felt Insecure About Your Looks, Author Rufi Thorpe Has Some Important Advice
Rufi Thorpe grew up in Southern California, raised by her mother and grandmother. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy for high school, but left without graduating to attend Eugene Lang College in New York where she studied philosophy and literature. After college, she spent some time as a waitress at a poorly run French café before being accepted as a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia's MFA program, where she learned to fish and wrote two novels that were not very good. Years of incredibly depressing waitressing followed, and then some very fun years of teaching composition to undergraduates before she sold her first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar , which was long-listed for the Dylan Thomas and Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. The novel follows Mia and Lorrie Ann, two best friends whose lives take sharply different paths but who don't seem to be able to let go of each other no matter how painful their relationship becomes. Thorpe's second novel,
