About

Jackie Townsend, a native of Southern California, spends a lot of her time in places not her own. As the youngest of four children, she carries with her a strong sense of family to these places, often foreign, and writes about belonging (or not belonging), loss, and love. She lives in New York with her husband. Reel Life is her first book.

I got the idea for Reel Life: A Novel upon leaving a theater with my sister one evening years ago. Something was different, as if the universe had been slightly altered. Perhaps we disagreed about the film later, over drinks, or laughed about it, I don’t remember. Just the thought, leaving the bar, that if you could piece together all the movies you’d ever seen with someone, you could write the story of their lives.