Annie Vanderbilt

Annie Vanderbilt began writing THE SECRET PAPERS OF MADAME OLIVETTI at age fifty-one, when she was one year younger than her protagonist, Lily Crisp, and worked on the novel for a decade. She and her husband, Bill Vanderbilt, have adventured all over the world together from the day they were married. They began in the Peace Corps in India in 1968, then backpacked to Everest Base Camp in Nepal in 1972, and managed after that to sandwich wilderness and overseas adventures in countries such as Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Tibet into their lives for the next thirty-five years. They have also toured by bicycle through Japan, Scandinavia, Europe and New Zealand, covering a total of 12,500 miles. Annie has faced some reversals in her life that have had a profound influence on her writing. Twenty years ago, she fell off a cliff and struggled for six years to walk again. And in 2005, her house in Idaho burned to the ground, along with all of her family’s possessions. Her novel is named for the typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32 Portable, on which she wrote a previous book (the only existing manuscript was destroyed in the house fire). She recalls that it was laborious work writing on the antiquated typewriter, but that she became quite attached to the machine, which also was lost in the fire. Annie Vanderbilt grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College, and lived in Ketchum, Idaho, for twenty-five years. She currently lives on Sanibel Island, Florida, with her husband, and is at work on her second novel.