Erin McKean is the blogger behind A Dress A Day , the inspiration for this novel. Her writing has been featured in many media outlets from The NY Times Magazine to Foreign Affairs . She currently works as the editor of VERBATIM , and was previously at OUP.
Roz Chast was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 26, 1954. She received a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1977. Her cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, Redbook, and Mother Jones. She is the author of several books including The Party, After You Left: Collected Cartoons 1995-2003, What I Hate: From A to Z, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006, and Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir. She has also illustrated several books including The Alphabet from A to Y, with Bonus Letter, Z by Steve Martin.
Simon Winchester has written works based on his travels through Africa, India and Hong Kong, including The River at the Center of the World (1996), about his trip along the Yangtze River. He has also written The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Alice Behind Wonderland and served as the Asia-Pacific editor for Conde Nast Traveler. He lives in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland. His title The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2013.