Ava Dellaira Books in Order

Ava Dellaira was born in Los Angeles, but she grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has written warmly about the wide desert sky, long summer days, and the imaginary games she played with her sister. That mix of family life and inner worlds still feels close to her books.

She was making up stories long before she thought of herself as a novelist.

One of her earliest writing memories comes from second grade, when she was asked to write a poem about things she liked. When she got to her mother, the words suddenly felt too small. Years later, her mother's sudden death became part of the emotional spark behind Love Letters to the Dead.

Dellaira studied at the University of Chicago, then earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. After Iowa, she moved to Los Angeles planning to become a screenwriter. That interest in scenes and emotional beats still shows up in her fiction.

A turning point came when she worked for Stephen Chbosky and became an associate producer on the film version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. After reading some of her work, he told her he thought she should write a novel. During a drive home one night, the title Love Letters to the Dead came to her, and she started writing it that same night.

That first book introduced many readers to Dellaira's style. Laurel, the teenage narrator, writes letters to dead artists and public figures while trying to make sense of her sister's death, her family, and her first love. Readers often connect with the raw grief, the music threaded through the story, and Laurel's search for a self that is not defined only by loss. In In Search Of Us, Dellaira widens the frame. The novel follows Angie, a mixed-race teenager looking for the father she has never known, while also looking back at her mother Marilyn at seventeen.

It becomes part road trip, part family mystery, and part coming-of-age story, with Los Angeles and New Mexico both mattering as more than scenery. Then came Exposure, her move into adult fiction, a multi-perspective novel about one night, the grief that follows it, and the ways race, desire, ambition, and memory shape what people believe to be true.

Again and again, Dellaira writes about grief, family secrets, first love, and the past refusing to stay put.

She now lives just outside Los Angeles with her husband and their two children, near the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. When she is not writing, she has said she spends much of her time with family, reading, hiking, doing yoga, watching movies and TV, and making trips to the ocean. Those everyday details fit her work well. Even in her heavier books, life is never far from the kitchen table.