L. D. Crichton
Author L.D. Crichton weighed two pounds, 14 ounces when born three months prematurely 39 years ago.
Her fighting spirit — through teenage motherhood, job reinvention and struggles with anxiety — has been on display ever since.
“I’ve been writing since I could hold a pencil,” says the mother of three whose breakout success came last year with publication of her young adult book All Our Broken Pieces. Published by Disney
Books, it’s a nominee for the prestigious 2020 White Pine award, recognizing the best Canadian book for high school-aged teens.
That fighting spirit means not only tackling her own life challenges head on — “if someone said I couldn’t do something, that made me even more determined” — but also tackling serious issues in her books. All Our Broken Pieces is about first love between two troubled youth — one with obsessive compulsive disorder.
“My mother would unload groceries and arrange them alphabetically. We just thought she was organized.”
Her own struggles with anxiety make it critical to be honest with readers about mental health and the misinformation that exists.
Crichton watched her father sit down to write after working all day.
“I thought that’s what everyone did,” she says, admitting to writing “angsty” poetry as a teenager and, in Grade 7, a story about “possessed dolls.”
Her mother insisted she have a “real” job, beginning a trail through hairstyling, office work and, eventually, mapping for an oil company.
She has written eight novels in 15 years, including on Wattpad (an internet community dedicated to user-generated writing), wrote official fan fiction for boy band One Direction, and published her e-book, Enchantment of Emma Fletcher, in 2017.
After Disney’s purchase of her book, Crichton was laid off from her 14-year energy industry job. She’s now working full-time as a visual novel editor for a video-game developer.
Her second YA novel will tackle the suicide of a teenager’s identical twin. Crichton hopes to have it finished — and sold — this year.