Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels and two award-winning story collections. Her latest novel, THE WONDER TEST, is “a sharply written, subtly satirical thriller” (Booklist, starred review), featuring FBI Agent Lina Connerly, whose skills at international spycraft help her navigate the treacherous Silicon Valley suburbs.
Michelle’s previous books include the 2017 Sunday Times bestseller THE MARRIAGE PACT, which was published in 31 languages; GOLDEN STATE, the critically acclaimed novel that imagines modern-day California on the brink of secession from the United States; the international bestseller THE YEAR OF FOG; and the story collection HUM, winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Her novels are set in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the Deep South. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Glimmer Train, Playboy, Oxford American, Boulevard, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere.
Michelle Richmond was born and raised in Alabama and makes her home with her husband and son in Northern California. She is the recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Short Story, the Hall-Waters Prize for significant contributions to Southern literature, and the Grace Paley Prize for Fiction. She is currently at work on a memoir of her expat years in Paris, which happened to collide with the longest transit strikes in half a century, 18 months of yellow vest protests, and the pandemic.
Michelle’s books are recommended for fans of Sue Grafton, Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, David Baldacci, Kate Atkinson, and Liane Moriarty.
“Michelle Richmond is a bit of a chimera: her novels certainly have mainstream, commercial appeal but there’s often a dark core to them, along with influences that include Italo Calvino and Paul Auster…No One You Know is as much Borgesian mystery as it is the story of a complex relationship between a woman and her sibling…a fascinating exploration of the past, of family secrets, and of a centuries-old mathematical puzzle.”
Jeff VanderMeer, bestselling author of the Southern Reach Triology
“Michelle Richmond has established herself as mistress of the kind of literary mystery which packs the punch of a fine thriller but with added insight and wisdom.” The Daily Mail
Michelle holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she was a James Michener Fellow. She has received the Palle Rosenkrantz Prize for the best crime novel published in Denmark, the Truman Capote Prize for Distinguished Alabama Writer of the Short Story, the Grace Paley Prize for Fiction (for The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress), the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize (for Hum), the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. In 2022 she will be inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. The Year of Fog (translated as L’annee brouillard) was a finalist for Elle Priz des Lectrices in France and was the 2009 selection of Silicon Valley Reads.
Michelle has taught in the Masters of Fine Arts programs in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts, and has served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and St. Mary’s College of Moraga. She also held the Sister Catharine Julie Cunningham Chair at Notre Dame de Namur University, and she teaches novel writing for Stanford Continuing Studies. She has served on the board of The Authors Guild since 2010.
Michelle’s stories and essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Glimmer Train, Boulevard, Playboy, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Oxford American, Readers Digest UK, The Believer, Best American Fantasy, and many other magazines and anthologies. She has also written about travel to Iceland, Slovenia, Budapest, China, and elsewhere for The Telegraph, 7×7, Coastal Living, and other publications.
I grew up the middle of three sisters in Mobile, Alabama. We spent vacations in Gatlinburg, TN, Disney World, and with my grandparents in Brookhaven, Mississippi.
At the University of Alabama, I majored in Journalism and English. As the managing editor of the university’s yearbook, I published what I suppose was technically my first book, a collector’s edition bound in red velvet (yes, velvet!) celebrating the university’s centennial. I was also a founding member of the university’s undergraduate literary magazine, Marr’s Field Journal, which is still in publication today. Mostly it was an excuse for all of us to sit around drinking cheap beer and talking abut our poetry (don’t worry, I haven’t written a poem since 1990 and I’m not about to start now).
After working in advertising. magazines, and (of course) restaurants in Knoxville and Atlanta, I moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to “study” in the MFA program in creative writing. During my first week in Arkansas, I met a guy named Kevin from San Francisco, crawled through his window in the middle of the night, and decided he was the one. This might be a sordid one-night-stand story, except for the fact that we have now been together for 26 years.
I grew weary of Arkansas as soon as Kevin quit the MFA for a real job, leaving me alone at the end of the Pig Trail (yes, it’s actually called that), so I transferred to the University of Miami, where I completed my MFA, taught creative writing, and wrote my first story collection in a studio apartment on the beach. Then I joined Kevin in New York City. We lived in a one-bedroom, fourth-floor walkup on 84th Street, between Amsterdam and Central Park West. Although it was a great apartment, it was packed to overflowing with 1980s clothes and old magazines belonging to the woman who was subletting it to us, a former model who would occasionally let herself in to remove my clothes from the wardrobe and throw them on the floor. Kevin and I dreamt of moving to San Francisco and getting our own place, where I could throw my own clothes on the floor with abandon.
After a few months pounding the pavement of Manhattan as a sales rep for a company that sold credit card processing machines, a job in which I did not exactly distinguish myself, I spent one month as an entry-level something-or-other in a cubicle at Ogilve and Mather, where I began to die a slow and insignificant death of the soul. Remembering the words of the first boss who ever fired me (Storyville Cafe, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1992: “Michelle, you’re a nice person but you’re just not cut out to be a waitress,”) I told myself, “Michelle, you’re a nice person but you’re just not cut out to be in advertising.” I answered a classified ad in the New York Times and ended up with an office job in the Empire State Building. I worked for a Chinese trading company, just like the one George describes in that episode of Seinfeld, when he claims to be in the import/export business. Two weeks into the job, which mostly involved putting together vacuum cleaners, my boss sent me to Beijing. My subsequent three-month solo stint in Beijing provided material for my first novel, DREAM OF THE BLUE ROOM.
Eventually, Kevin proposed to me in Central Park (a version of that scene shows up in GOLDEN STATE), and a couple of months later we moved to San Francisco. I managed our (haunted) apartment building in the Castro, the San Miguel, a job I did poorly but with the best of intentions. In the winter of 2001, we made good on the Central Park proposal and got married in a small ceremony is Yosemite. I remember racing around Budapest on the first day of our honeymoon, desperately searching for a FedEx office from which to mail the rent checks, which we’d forgotten to mail from the San Francisco airport on our way out of town after the wedding. (Nineteen years later we would return to Budapest, our last big trip before the pandemic, and we would be stunned to find ourselves staying in the exact same room, with the exact same view of the Danube, and the exact same tapestry on the wall, but that is another story).
We bought our first house, a sweet Doelger that looked like a Krispy Kreme Drive-in, in Daly City, possibly the foggiest place on earth (hence, THE YEAR OF FOG). A couple of years later, we traded the Krispy Kreme house for an even smaller one in San Francisco’s Richmond district (no relation), 1200 square feet and a postage stamp back yard out in the avenues, eight blocks from the beach, with a tiny but perfect view of the Pacific. Our house in the Richmond was the model for the home in GOLDEN STATE, as well as THE MARRIAGE PACT.
Every place I have lived has eventually made it into one of my books. So too with the small town near Silicon Valley where we now live, the inspiration for my new novel, The Wonder Test.
I’m now at work on a novel and memoir set in Paris. Every place tells a story.
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