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JJ Elliott

Biography

JJ Elliott

JJ Elliott is an advertising copywriter with a degree in English from UCLA. She lost her mother to suicide as a teenager and spent over two years in her 20s volunteering on the suicide hotlines in LA. One of the reasons she wanted to write this book is because she finds herself increasingly frustrated by the way suicide is treated in print and on-screen, as a mystery to be solved instead of a multi-layered, complex condition that can rarely be boiled down to one specific “reason.”

A native of Northern California, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two teenage children. She loves to read, play tennis, drink wine and eat cheese. THERE ARE NO RULES FOR THIS is her first novel.

Books by JJ Elliott

There Are No Rules for This
by JJ Elliott - Fiction, Women's Fiction

People like Feeney Simms don’t commit suicide. Beautiful, charismatic, mother of two, wife to a handsome, successful husband, beloved by her friends --- this is not the typical picture of a tortured soul. But one summer night, Feeney drives to the beach and swallows a handful of pills. No note, no explanation, nothing. Just like that, she’s gone. Faced with this loss, Ali, Max and Liddy, Feeney’s closest friends, are left reeling, grappling with the devastating cocktail of grief, guilt and anger that’s left in the wake of a suicide. In a desperate attempt to avoid further loss, the three women make the unorthodox (and very Feeney-like) decision to hold their own funerals while they are still alive --- and the experience changes each of them in ways they couldn’t have imagined.