The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Julie Orringer was born on June 12, 1973, in Miami, Florida. Both her parents were third-year medical students at the University of Miami. When Orringer was four, the family lived in Boston. When she was six, they moved to New Orleans, where she lived until she was twelve. She attended a private school, and being one of the few Jewish children in the class, she felt like an outsider. She loved reading and writing and thought she might like to write novels someday.

In 1986, the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Orringer attended a public school from eighth grade. The book that most influenced her at the time was Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which she read in high school. During Orringer's school years, her mother was fighting a long battle with breast cancer, the disease that eventually killed her. Orringer says this experience gave her an early awareness that she might lose her mother, and this feeling of insecurity, loss, and the possibility of death has colored her stories.

Orringer attended Cornell University, where some of her professors began to encourage her to pursue a career as a writer. During her junior year, she started reading all the contemporary fiction she could find, including Raymond Carver, Charles Baxter, Mona Simpson, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and Alice Munro.

Orringer graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from Cornell in 1994. She decided to continue her study of writing at Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and graduated with a master of fine arts degree in 1996.

After graduation, Orringer moved to San Francisco where she undertook a variety of non-writing-related jobs in order to make money while reserving her creative energies for her fiction. In 1999, Orringer received a Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. By this time, her stories were being published in literary magazines and books, including the Barcelona Review, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best New American Voices 2001, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2002. "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones" was first published in Zoetrope: All Story. Nine of Orringer's stories, including "The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones," were published in the collection, How to Breathe Underwater, by Knopf in 2003. After graduating from the Stegner Program, Orringer held a three-year lectureship in fiction writing at Stanford.

As of 2006, Orringer is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary's College of California. She lives with her husband, the writer Ryan Harty, in San Francisco.