Rachel Reilich realized her destiny to become a really good writer when her high school crush, Jeff Larson, wrote “you’re a really good writer” in her yearbook. Jeff Larson had never read a word she’d written. In fact, outside two seminal (and top-secret) poems (about Jeff Larson), Ms. Reilich really hadn’t written much—but that would change when she went to UCLA. There, under the tutelage of two brilliant authors, Carolyn See and David Wong Louie, Ms. Reilich wrote her first short stories—mostly caustic tales told from the points of view of sexually adventurous teenage girls with vaguely Swedish names like Britt and Elisa. That Ms. Reilich, a never-been-kissed mega-virgin with a decidedly non-Swedish name managed to craft such tales is—truly—testament to her abilities in fiction.

Her sophomore year concluded with two cataclysmic and formative events: Her father died of Leukemia and her English Professor deflowered her. Like a heroine out of Henry James, Ms. Reilich cut her hair and fled to London. There, she read Shakespeare, James Joyce, and Zadie Smith, and learned to call desserts “pudding”. She also wrote a one-act play about a father who dies of Leukemia and the women he leaves behind. This play earned her a spot at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The pudding: 15 pounds.

Two weeks after moving to New York City, she—along with many others—witnessed September 11th. This meant everyone in her graduate program felt compelled to write Important Plays About Terrorism. Needless to say, these plays were terrible. Ms. Reilich somewhat prides herself on having lacked the hubris to even attempt to write an Important Play, and instead write about a teenage boy who falls for an older woman who can’t drive, and a sorority girl who murders her Art Professor. These two scripts, along with a gender-bending South Park spec, earned her the Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Award in Screenwriting.

Upon graduating, Ms. Reilich had some trouble adjusting. As opposed to the world of fiction, the real world troubled her—she had no talent for it. For a while, she worked at ABC as an assistant to a Senior VP of Business Affairs, a diehard Atkins Diet devotee who periodically called her into his flatulence-filled office to lament, “I don’t understand! You were Phi Beta Kappa! How are you this bad at filing?”

The Senior VP also liked to grab bananas from the fruit bowl and wag them in Ms. Reilich’s face, exclaiming, “Want a banana? Oops! That was inappropriate!” and bought her black lingerie for Christmas. One thing you can say about Business Affairs Senior VPs: they take workplace sensitivity training seriously.

After a year of corporate torture, the normally risk-averse Ms. Reilich took a huge, precarious leap: she arranged to be fired. In the following months, she collected unemployment and wrote. She wrote a screenplay about a girl who falls in love with a man who appears only in her dreams. She wrote voice-overs for a Nature Channel pilot, which the producers pitched to her (in all seriousness) as, “Sex and the City—with manatees.” And finally, she wrote a first chapter and proposal for a Young Adult series called POSEUR. The week she cashed her last unemployment check, and the day before her 27th birthday, the pitch sold: a four book deal with Little, Brown & Company.

She was now a working writer.

Since then she has published four Young Adult novels (THE POSEUR SERIES, Little, Brown & Co.), served as head writer for the NYTimes Bestseller, GOOD PEOPLE (National Geographic Books), written and developed a comedy pilot (Amazon Studios), created a teen series for mobile storytelling network Episode Interactive (Party Girls & Party Girls: Rehab), authored a baby book, contributed essays and criticism (The LA Review of Books, GOOD Magazine, Upworthy), crafted Clio-award-winning campaign copy and taglines for THE REFINERY CREATIVE, interviewed sexy celebrities (InStyle Magazine), produced slogans, video scripts, web copy, and illustrations (The United Nations, The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, Lululemon, Hennessy, PayPal, Johnson & Johnson, Walgreens, among others), and scripted season three of Life 2.0 for FoxNext Games/Storyscape. She is adept at a wide range of styles, from pop culture-driven young adult comedy to incisive profiles of leaders in science and fine art.

She is still terrible at filing.

Cover photograph by Andrew Van Baal for the James Turrell 'Breathing Light' Retrospective at LACMA.

(I'm the lab coat on the left.)