A prolific author of unflinchingly realistic young adult novels, Chris Lynch was born July 2, 1962, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Edward, was a bus driver and died when Lynch was five; Dorothy Lynch supported her seven children working as a receptionist. Growing up in the Jamaica Plain district of Boston, Lynch found his experiences in a Catholic grade school gratifying but disliked the all-boys Catholic high school he later attended. Rebelling against a system that emphasized organized sports over the arts, he dropped out in his junior year.

Lynch began attending Boston University as a political science major, but a course in news writing shifted his focus and he transferred to Suffolk University to study journalism. Although he knew he wanted to write, he did not admit—even to himself— that he was drawn to fiction writing. After graduating in 1983, he spend several...