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Allie Rowbottom

Biography

Allie Rowbottom

Allie Rowbottom is the author of the novel AESTHETICA and the memoir JELL-O GIRLS, a New York Times Editor’s Choice Selection, Amazon Best Book of the Month, Indie Next Pick, and Real Simple Best Book of the Year. Allie’s essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon, Lit Hub, No Tokens, NY Tyrant, The Drunken Canal, Alta Journal, Bitch and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and has taught fiction and nonfiction at the University of Houston, CalArts and Catapult. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer Jon Lindsey.

Allie Rowbottom

Books by Allie Rowbottom

Aesthetica
by Allie Rowbottom - Fiction, Women's Fiction

At 19, she was an Instagram celebrity. Now, at 35, she works behind the cosmetic counter at the “black and white store,” peddling anti-aging products to women seeking physical and spiritual transformation. She, too, is seeking rebirth. She’s about to undergo the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica™, a procedure that will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, hopefully returning her to a truer self. Provided she survives the knife. But on the eve of the surgery, her traumatic past resurfaces when she is asked to participate in the public takedown of her former manager/boyfriend, who has rebranded himself as a paragon of “woke” masculinity in the post-#MeToo world. With the hours ticking down to her surgery, she must confront the ugly truth about her experiences on and off the Instagram grid.

JELL-O Girls: A Family History
by Allie Rowbottom - Memoir, Nonfiction

In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege --- but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism and mysterious ailments. More than 100 years later, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with the same cancer that had claimed her own mother's life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse," Mary started researching her family's past. Before she died, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, hoping that her daughter might write what she could not. JELL-O GIRLS is the liberation of that story.