Jeannine Garsee grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, which is also the setting for Say the Word and Before, After, and Somebody in Between. She began telling stories through pictures as soon as she learned to draw; then, when she grew older, she added captions to the pictures, till the captions grew long enough to knock the pictures off the page. As the author of three "practice" novels before she was out of high school, she never wanted to be anything except a writer-but she fell under a strange, insidious spell and found herself in the nursing profession instead. Jeannine now works as a psychiatric nurse in an inner-city hospital and lives with her family in a southwest suburb of Cleveland.