Gayle Forman

Gayle Forman, born June 5, 1970, is an American author best known for young adult fiction that places teenagers at moments of pressure, choice, loss, and change. She began not as a novelist but as a journalist, writing for Seventeen magazine, where most of her articles focused on young people and social concerns. That early work gave her a close view of adolescent lives and the issues surrounding them, a focus that would carry into her fiction.

Forman later worked as a freelance journalist for Details, Jane, Glamour, The Nation, Elle Magazine, and Cosmopolitan. In 2002, she and her husband, Nick, took a trip around the world, gathering experiences and information that became the basis for her first book, the travelogue You Can’t Get There From Here: A Year On the Fringes of a Shrinking World. Published in 2005, it showed her interest in lives shaped by movement, distance, and social change. In 2007, she published her first young adult novel, Sisters in Sanity, based on an article she had written for Seventeen.

Her widest recognition came with If I Stay, released in 2009. The novel follows Mia, a 17-year-old girl who has been in a tragic car accident and lies in a coma while fully aware of what is happening around her. The book topped the New York Times best sellers list for Young Adult Fiction, won the 2009 NAIBA Book of the Year Award, and was a 2010 Indies Choice Book Award winner. It was adapted into a film of the same name starring Chloë Grace Moretz, released in the United States on August 22, 2014. Its sequel, Where She Went, appeared in 2011 and told Adam and Mia’s story a few years after the accident, from Adam’s point of view.

Forman continued to build linked stories around love, absence, and perspective. Just One Day, released in January 2013, follows Allyson Healey after she meets Willem, a Dutch vagabond actor, at the end of a post-graduation European tour. Its sequel, Just One Year, published in October 2013, follows the same span of time from Willem’s perspective. A final 50-page ebook novella, Just One Night, was released on May 29, 2014. In January 2015, she published I Was Here, about an 18-year-old girl coping with the sudden suicide of her best friend; movie rights were picked up by New Line Cinema a month later. Her first adult novel, Leave Me, was released on September 6, 2016, with a U.K. release on October 19, 2017.

Her bibliography also includes I Have Lost My Way, We Are Inevitable, Frankie & Bug, Not Nothing, and After Life. Forman has received honors including the British Fantasy Award and the ALA/YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, both in 2010, along with several award nominations. She resides in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband Nick Tucker and her daughter. Across journalism, travel writing, young adult novels, and adult fiction, her work remains closely tied to young people facing hard questions, and to the human need to be heard in moments of uncertainty.