Photo: William Garrett
Hoo, boy. By now, there’s little you don’t know about me, if you’ve read my book. (This can make dating embarrassing. Try explaining the essay, “I Wasted Two Years on a Man I Never Met” to a blind date who’s Googled you.)
But let’s see if I can fill in some of the blanks. I was raised in Stockton, CA, by a shy, schoolteacher mother and an EXTREMELY colorful, Argentinean father, to put it mildly.
When I was eight, we moved to the suburbs of New York, where I spent the next ten years trying rather unsuccessfully to fit in. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, joined a sorority—still trying to fit in—and worked as a waitress at Casa De Lara, where I spent many stolen hours in the walk-in cooler with the bartender.
After college, I traveled around the world for four years. I spent two of those in Jerusalem, where I worked as a waitress and learned Hebrew. Then I moved to Tokyo for six months, working as a “hostess””—a sort of modern-day geisha—in a strip club. I traveled five or six times to Egypt and swam in the Nile; hitchhiked through Jordan; backpacked all over Europe; and spent 10 lonely days in Buenos Aires. (I get hungry before 11:00 P.M., so I ate in one empty restaurant after another.)
When I returned to the States, I got a job as a secretary on the trading floor of an investment bank, where I watched grown men do one-handed pushups for cheeseburgers. A childhood friend who worked as an editor at the now-defunct Biography magazine gave me my first writing assignment, a review of a coffee table book entitled, Barbie: 4 Decades of Fashion and Fun. My observations about her “endless good-hair days and enviable 2 cm waist” led to a full-time freelance writing career.
Two years later I woke up having heart palpitations because I couldn’t pay rent. So I took a part-time writing job at US Weekly. There, I broke the “Ben Affleck Marries J. Lo—and We Have All the Wedding Details!” story. Think I might be able to sell a signed copy of that on Ebay?
A few months later, I landed a full-time job at Glamour, and after four years as a staffer, they offered me a writing contract, which I hold to this day.
Somewhere along the way, an editor friend suggested I write a personal essay about my father; that turned into the Esquire piece, “My Father, the Fraud,” (note: there are spoilers in this piece) which, in turn, became the book.
Now I live in Brooklyn with my dog, Violet, a large book collection, and a flat-screen TV, where I watch The Rachel Zoe Project, A&E’s Obsessed, Project Runway, and America’s Next Top Model. (For research, in case I ever write a book on reality television.)
Official bio: Laurie Sandell is a contributing editor at Glamour, where she writes cover stories, features, and personal essays. She has also written for Esquire, GQ, New York, and InStyle, among other publications. The Impostor’s Daughter: A True Memoir is her first book.
