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:: About The Author :: |
BIRTH NAME: Cecily von Ziegesar DATE OF BIRTH: June 27, 1970 BIRTHPLACE: New York City, New York ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer NAME MEANING: Blind
Cecily was born to an affluent family and grew up in Manhattan. She attended and graduated from The Nightingale-Bamford School, a prestigious all-girls private prep school on the exclusive Upper East Side. After graduating from Nightingale, Cecily attended Colby College. Then she spent a year in Budapest working for a local radio station. She soon returned to the United States to study creative writing at the University of Arizona.
In New York City, she found a job with book-packaging firm Alloy Entertainment, where she became inspired to create the Gossip Girl series. The Gossip Girl books present a view of high-end teenage lifestyles, with topics ranging from drugs, alcohol, sexual exploration, and twisted friendships. The series climbed to the top of the New York Times Best-Sellers list in 2002 and was adapted for television in 2007. The spin-off, The It Girl, made the list in 2005. The Constance Billard School for Girls, the Gossip Girl characters' elite single-sex school, is based upon Cecily's all-girls private prep school, Nightingale-Bamford. As well, events from the book are based on her extremely wealthy friends who had "those parents" and "those lives", as well as Cecily's own life as being a gossip.
She met and started dating a "dashing Englishman" while on a vacation to NYC from Arizona, and after a few months, she was living with him in North London. They married a year later. Since 1998, the couple has lived in New York City. Cecily has a daughter named Agnes, and when asked if she was going to hide her daughter from the drama of prep school girls, Cecily replied, "Not a chance. I would send her to Nightingale; I feel I got a great education there." Cecily also has a son, named Oscar. Cecily, her husband, and two children reside in Brooklyn and have a nearly hairless cat named Pony Boy.
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