The Best Girlfriend You Never Had (Author Biography)

Author Biography

When Pam Houston published her first collection of stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, in 1992, she established herself as a promising young American fiction writer and a model for women who aspired to a life of outdoor adventure. Houston drew on her experiences as river guide, rafter, rock climber, skier, and extreme backpacker for the stories, and critics favorably compared her to writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Richard Ford, who similarly extol the joys of confronting the natural world head-on. Born in 1962 in New Jersey, the only child of a businessman and an actress, Houston grew up practicing to be a world-class tennis player, largely to please her father. After winning a tournament at thirteen, she gave up the sport for good. Houston pursued a life of adventure in earnest after graduating from Denison University in Ohio, bicycling through Canada and down to Colorado. After a series of odd jobs such as bartending, working on road crews, teaching skiing, etc., Houston entered the doctoral program in creative writing at the University of Utah. She left six months short of completing her degree.

Houston's second collection, Waltzing the Cat (1998), which contains her popular story "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had," was as popular as her first, and publications such as Mirabella, Mademoiselle, The New York Times, Elle, and Vogue solicited essays and stories from her. A licensed river and hunting guide and seasoned horserider, Houston created characters like herself: tough, daring women who fall in love easily and have their hearts broken. In addition to her story collections, Houston has edited Women on Hunting: Essays, Fiction, and Poetry (1994), and written the text for Men Before Ten A.M. (1997), a collection of photographs by French photographer Veronique Vial of male celebrities just waking up. In her book of essays, A Little More About Me, published in 1999, Houston writes of her globe-trotting adventures across five continents in places such as Bhutan, Bolivia, and Traverse City, Michigan during a five-year period in her life. In this text, she also muses on topics such as body image, the right of dogs to be free, her addiction to adrenaline, and the importance of close friends. A dynamic reader and gifted teacher, Houston appears often on talk shows and teaches at writing conferences. Houston lives on a 120-acre ranch in southwestern Colorado outside Durango.