Nancy Crochiere’s debut novel, GRACELAND, is a humorous and heartwarming story of a single mom forced to chase her Elvis-obsessed mother and pink-haired teenaged daughter to Memphis to stop them from revealing her long-held secret. It’s being published by Avon/HarperCollins on May 30, 2023. For thirteen years, Nancy Crochiere chronicled the ups and downs of family life—including her obsession with George Clooney—in her humorous newspaper column, “The Mother Load.” In 2024, she published a collection of those columns that was a finalist for Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year in humor and the Independent Publishers of New England 2014 Book Award. A graduate of Middlebury College, Nancy earned a master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Minnesota and is an alumna of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program. She worked for many years as a development editor for various educational publishers while also writing essays for The Boston Globe, Writer’s Digest, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog. With her two daughters now grown, she lives north of Boston with her husband, a lawyer and marathoner, and a few house plants that could use more attention. In her spare time, Nancy acts as an “extra” in feature films and TV shows. You can see her as the distraught mother-of-the-bride in the opening moments of Love, Weddings, and Other Disasters, or catch her staring unapologetically at Bradley Cooper’s backside in Joy.