Maggie Alderson was born in London.  She has worked on nine magazines - editing four of them, including British ELLE - and has been going to fashion shows for 20 years.  She is currently a fashion columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald, for which she covers the fashion shows in Milan and Paris twice a year.  Her novels Pants on Fire, Mad About the Boy, Handbags and Gladrags and Cents and Sensibility were bestsellers in Australia and the UK, and she was a co-editor of the anthology Big Night Out, in aid of the War Child charity. She has also had her collections of non-fiction Shoe Money, Handbag Heaven and Gravity Sucks published by Penguin. Her latest novel is How to Break Your Own Heart and will be followed by The Incredible Disappearing Woman in 2010.