Julie Myerson's literary career began in the early 1990s amid considerable publicity, when she gained her first publishing contract after winning a writing competition in a popular women's magazine. She has subsequently acquired a reputation as a promising novelist with a particular talent for conveying physical experience in a frank and forthright manner not generally characteristic of contemporary British writers. The ease with which she represents sexual interactions led Ruth Padel to suggest in a 12 April 1998 review of her novel Me and the Fat Man (1998) in The Independent on Sunday (London) that she "writes about sex like an angel brought up in a brothel."

Born Julie Susan Pike on 2 June 1960 and brought up in Nottingham with two younger sisters, Amanda and Deborah, Myerson has attested in print on many occasions to traumatic experiences during her childhood. She portrays her parents as entirely mismatched. Her mother, Maritza Simpson Pike...