Julianna Baggott was born on September 10, 1969, in Wilmington, Delaware, and was raised in the nearby town of Newark. Baggott attended Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she studied creative writing and French. While she was at Loyola, she also studied abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she received a certificate in language proficiency in 1990. After she completed a bachelor’s degree in 1991, Baggott went on to earn an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of North Carolina in 1994. Baggott soon married David Scott, who was also a creative writing student at North Carolina.

In 1998, Baggott received a call from an agent asking if she was interested in writing a novel, and so she turned a short story, “Girl Talk,” into a novel by the same name, which was published in 2001. At the same time, Baggott had a collection of...