Ann Leary Books in Order

Ann Leary was born in Syracuse, New York, and spent much of her childhood moving from town to town before her family settled in Marblehead, Massachusetts. She has said that all that moving made her pay close attention to people, especially the difference between insiders and newcomers. That outsider's eye shows up all through her work, whether she is writing about a North Shore town, a Connecticut lake house, or a young woman trying to find her footing in a system built against her.

That habit of watching people never really left.

Leary started at Bennington College and later transferred to Emerson College in Boston, where she took a comedy writing class taught by Denis Leary. They began dating after the class ended, and she has joked that he more or less never left. Long before she published her first novel, she was already writing, observing, and figuring out how to turn awkward, painful, and funny real-life moments into stories.

Her first book, An Innocent, a Broad, came out of a frightening stretch in 1990, when what was supposed to be a short trip to London turned into months away from home after her son Jack was born prematurely. The memoir is funny, worried, and unsentimental all at once. It is about new motherhood, culture shock, money stress, and the odd fact that a family emergency can unfold alongside the start of a career.

Then she moved into fiction.

In Outtakes from a Marriage, she writes about a Manhattan wife trying to hold onto herself when fame and suspected infidelity throw her marriage off balance. The Good House goes deeper and darker. Its narrator, Hildy Good, is a sharp real-estate broker on Boston's North Shore, a woman who can read everyone around her better than she can face her own drinking. Readers tend to like Leary for exactly that mix, humor, discomfort, and emotional mess that feels true to life.

The Children returns to New England, this time through a wealthy blended family gathered at a Connecticut lake house, where inheritance, class, and old resentments simmer under polished manners. With The Foundling, Leary shifted into historical fiction after researching her maternal grandmother, who had worked at a Pennsylvania institution for women. The novel follows two former orphanage friends on opposite sides of that system and digs into friendship, eugenics, and the danger women faced when other people got to define what was normal.

She has also written essays and journalism for The New York Times, Ploughshares, NPR, Redbook, and Real Simple, among other outlets. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages. Her essay Rallying to Keep the Game Alive became an episode of Modern Love, and The Good House was adapted into a film starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline.

In I've Tried Being Nice, she circles back to nonfiction with essays about people-pleasing, alcoholism, animals, marriage, home life, and the strange little embarrassments that linger for years and eventually become material. The voice is older, maybe a bit less patient, but still very funny. Readers who come to Leary for wit usually stay for the honesty underneath it.

Ann Leary lives in New York with her husband, Denis Leary. Over the years she has also been known for her love of horses and dogs, her equestrian life, and her work as a volunteer EMT. Those details matter because her books rarely float above ordinary life. They stay close to the daily stuff, family tension, private fear, social performance, and the stories people tell to keep themselves going.