Gae Polisner Books in Order

Gae Polisner writes novels for young adult and middle-grade readers, often about kids trying to find their footing after life has changed without asking permission. She also works as a family-law attorney and mediator, a job she has continued alongside her writing career.

Stories and poems were there from the beginning. As a child, Polisner wrote rhyming verse, including an earnest antiwar poem shaped by the fact that her father, a young MASH-unit surgeon, had been sent to Vietnam for a year. Later she filled pages with free verse and angsty love poems, sometimes decorating them with watercolor.

In college and afterward, she kept writing. She took workshops at Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City and moved from poetry into short fiction, though becoming a published author still felt far beyond reach.

In 1988, she applied to law school. After graduating, she began practicing family law, got married, and became a mother. When she was pregnant with her second son, she realized how much she missed making things up on the page and began work on a novel.

It took five years to finish.

That first manuscript found an agent but never sold. Neither did the second. Polisner kept going, and her third novel, first written with her sons in mind and originally titled Steinbeck, The Scoot, and the Pull of Gravity, became The Pull of Gravity. The book follows a teen, his dying best friend, and an unlikely road trip, mixing friendship, family trouble, first love, and John Steinbeck. It launched her career and received a Bank Street award.

Her later books stay close to young people at painful turning points. The Summer of Letting Go follows a girl carrying guilt over her little brother's death. The Memory of Things brings two teens together in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. In In Sight of Stars, a grieving teen artist works through a crisis and treatment in a psychiatric hospital. Jack Kerouac is Dead to Me looks at a strained friendship, family instability, and a first relationship that may not be what it seems.

Polisner also writes for younger readers. She co-wrote Seven Clues to Home and Consider the Octopus with Nora Raleigh Baskin, bringing the same interest in friendship, loss, humor, and kids who decide to act when the adults around them are struggling.

Her books don't promise easy answers. They make room for grief, messy families, loyalty, art, memory, and the small choices that help people move forward.

Polisner lives on Long Island with her husband and two sons. Away from the desk and her legal work, she swims in pools and in the open water off Long Island, and she has said she still hopes a wetsuit might one day turn her into a superhero.