Francesca Lia Block was born on December 3,1962, in Hollywood, California, to Irving and Gilda Block. Francesca knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer. In an interview with Shannon Maughan, she explains her early development: "I loved poetry. I kept journals and took writing classes. And I read a lot." Her parents, an accomplished painter and a poet, encouraged this development. Block practiced her writing and painting as a child. In her adolescent years she wrote poems and stories. When she reached high school, she and her friends began exploring Los Angeles. In the process she saw both the "fairy-tale magic" of the downtown and the darker, "adult" side of the city. These Los Angeles sights and sounds filtered through a teen's perception reappear often in her young adult novels.

Shortly before Block left for college at the University of...