Allie Rowbottom

Allie Rowbottom put an inherited fortune under the microscope in Jell-O Girls (Little, Brown, 2018), a memoir following three generations of women in her mother's line after a relative bought the Jell-O patent in 1899 for 450 dollars. Family lore held that the money carried a curse, and the book sets that story against plain illness, drinking and loss, opening at the bedside of her dying mother, Mary, and taking in her own eating disorder. Soho Press published her first novel, Aesthetica, in 2022. Anna, an Instagram celebrity fifteen years past her peak, considers an experimental operation meant to undo everything surgery has already done to her face and return it to how it started. NPR, Vanity Fair and Glamour all placed the book on year-end lists. Rowbottom, who lives in Los Angeles, studied for an MFA at CalArts under Maggie Nelson and publishes essays in Elle.