In Conversation with Kirsten Jones Neff
In A Small Indiscretion, nineteen-year-old Annie Black trades a bleak future in her washed-out hometown for a London winter of drinking and abandon. Some two decades later, in San Francisco, she is a successful lighting designer married to a good man, and the mother of three children. Then, one June morning, a photograph arrives in her mailbox, igniting an old longing and setting off a chain of events that threaten to overturn her family’s hard-won happiness. When Annie returns to London seeking answers, her indiscretions come to light, and she must piece together the mystery of her past—the fateful collision of liberation and sexual desire that drew an invisible map of her future.
Jan Ellison is a graduate of Stanford University and San Francisco State University's MFA Program. She has published award-winning short fiction, and was the recipient of a 2007 O. Henry Prize for her first story to appear in print. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Narrative Magazine, and has been shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and their four children. Her first novel, A Small Indiscretion, was published in January by Random House, and was an Oprah Editor's Pick and a San Francisco Chronicle Book Club Pick.
Kirsten Jones Neff is a writer, filmmaker, gardening teacher and poet who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of Stanford University, she also holds a Masters degree in Journalism from University of California, Berkeley.