Author of the week

Cecily von Ziegesar

Whether the creator of the Gossip Girl book series has ever grown up remains an open question, said Melissa Kravitz Hoeffner in The Wall Street Journal. But Cecily von Ziegesar has migrated south— by about 6 miles. Her salacious hit novels about the backstabbing students of a fictional elite private high school were inspired by her own experience of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Since 2006, though, she has lived in Brooklyn in a family-friendly upper-middleclass neighborhood that provides both the setting and title of Cobble Hill, her first novel about life beyond college. So far, writing for adults rather than teenagers doesn’t feel like a leap. “I don’t know if it’s completely irresponsible for me to say, but there’s no difference,” she says. “When I was writing Gossip Girl, I really was just trying to write a book I wanted to read that hadn’t been written yet. I feel that way about every book I write.”

Cobble Hill’s characters aren’t any less selfish than Gossip Girl’s, said Alisha Haridasani Gupta in The New York Times. One mother of two fakes multiple sclerosis to avoid school drop-off duty. One dad crushes on the nurse at his kids’ school. Drunken karaoke nights always turn competitive, and everyone seems to take house calls from a local marijuana dealer. Now 50, von Ziegesar says she took notes about her neighbors for years, jotting down observations on Post-Its. But Cobble Hill’s characters aren’t simply aged versions of their teen predecessors; they’re sympathetic. “I didn’t want them to be characters that you love to hate,” their creator says. “I couldn’t write the Gossip Girl books now, but I couldn’t have written Cobble Hill then. Hopefully I’ve progressed.”