Thrillerattack

Chelsea Cain was born February 5, 1972 in Iowa City, Iowa, to Mary Cain and Larry Schmidt.

Early Life

Chelsea Snow Cain spent her early childhood on a hippie commune outside of Iowa City. Her father resisted the Vietnam draft and her parents lived underground for several years. In 1978, she moved with her mother to Bellingham, WA where she attended Lowell Elementary School, Fairhaven Middle School and Sehome High School. She spent the school year in Bellingham with her mother and the summers in Florida with her father and step-mother and step-brother.

Chelsea left Bellingham after high school to study political science at the University of California at Irvine, where she wrote for the New University newspaper and became the opinion editor. After graduating in 1994, she attended the graduate school of journalism at the University of Iowa.

While at Iowa, she wrote a weekly column for The Daily Iowan. Her master’s thesis at the University of Iowa became Dharma Girl, a memoir about Chelsea’s early childhood on the hippie commune. One of her professors presented it to several editors for review, and Seal Press picked it up as Chelsea’s first published work. She was 24 years old.

She traveled across the United States on book tour with Dharma Girl, living for a brief period in Portland, Oregon and then in New York City. After a year stint in New York, she returned to Portland, and edited an anthology for Seal Press titled Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture.

Career

After working as a Creative Director at a PR firm in Portland for several years, Chelsea began writing humor books in her spare time, including The Hippie Handbook: How to Tie-Dye a T-Shirt, Flash a Peace Sign, and Other Essential Skills for the Carefree Life (Chronicle Books, 2004), Confessions of a Teen Sleuth (Bloomsbury, 2005), and Does this Cape Make Me Look Fat? Pop-Psychology for Superheroes (Chronicle Books, 2006), which Chelsea co-wrote with her husband. Chelsea also composed a weekly column for Portland’s alternative newspaper, The Portland Mercury, and has been a weekly columnist for Portland’s major daily, The Oregonian since 2003, when she left marketing behind to focus on writing full-time.

She wrote her first thriller Heartsick in 2004, when she was pregnant with her daughter. It was published on September 5, 2007 and was an instant New York Times Bestseller. Its follow-up Sweetheart was published on September 2, 2008, also an immediate New York Times Bestseller. The third in the series is expected in September 2009.

Chelsea is married to Marc Mohan, a video store owner and film reviewer for The Oregonian. They have one daughter, Eliza.

Chelsea and her family currently reside in Portland, Oregon.

Accolades

• Amazon Mystery/Thriller of 2007 for Heartsick
• Named one of Four Hot Authors for Fall 2007 by Entertainment Weekly
• Heartsick optioned as a Major Motion Picture in September 2007
• Booksense 76 Pick for Heartsick
• Barnes & Noble Developing Writer Pick for Heartsick
• NYTBR Editor’s Choice for Heartsick and Confessions of a Teen Sleuth: A Parody
• Heartsick translated into over 20 languages
• Sweetheart translated into 13 languages and counting

She was also nominated for the British ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards, in the Breakthrough Author category, and a featured alternate for Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, Mystery Guild, QPB.

Bibliography

• Dharma Girl (1996)
• Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture (1999)
• The Hippie Handbook: How to Tie-Dye a T-Shirt, Flash a Peace Sign, and Other Essential Skills for the Carefree Life (2004)
• Confessions of a Teen Sleuth: A Parody (2005)
• Does This Cape Make Me Look Fat? Pop-Psychology for Super Heroes (2006)
• Heartsick (2007)
• Sweetheart (2008)

External Links

ChelseaCain.com