Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (Filipacchi) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—October 10, 1967
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Hamilton College; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Amanda Filipacchi (fila-paki) is an American novelist. She was born in Paris and educated in both France and the U.S. She is the author of four novels, Nude Men (1993), Vapor (1999), Love Creeps (2005), and The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (2015). Her fiction has been translated into 13 languages.

Filipacchi was born in Paris, and was educated in France (attending the American School of Paris in St. Cloud) and in the U.S. She is the daughter of former model Sondra Peterson and Daniel Filipacchi, chairman emeritus of Hachette Filipacchi Medias.

Filipacchi has been writing since the age of thirteen, completing three unpublished novels in her teenage years. She has lived in New York since she was 17. She attended Hamilton College, from which she graduated with a B.A. in Creative Writing. At age 20 she tried her hand at non-fiction writing at Rolling Stone magazine. Then in 1990 Filipacchi enrolled in Columbia University's M.F.A fiction writing program, where she wrote a master's thesis, which she later turned into her first published novel, Nude Men.

In 1992, even before graduating from Columbia, her agent, Melanie Jackson, sold Nude Men to Viking Press. Filipacchi was only 24. The novel was translated widely and was anthologized in The Best American Humor 1994 (Simon & Schuster).

Reviewers have called Filipacchi "a prodigious postfeminist talent" and a "lovely comic surrealist." The Boston Globe described her writing style as "reminiscent in certain ways of Muriel Spark ... brisk, witty, knowing, mischievous." Love Creeps, her third book, was included in the syllabus for a course on the comic novel in Columbia University's graduate creative writing program.

In the lead-up to the release of The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, Bustle listed the novel as one the "12 of the Most Anticipated Books of 2015, aka the Titles We Can't Get Our Hands On Soon Enough." Huffington Post listed it as one of its "2015 Books We Can't Wait To Read." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/5/2016.)