I was born in New York, where my father, also named Allison, was doing post-graduate work in biology. For the next ten years, my family traveled quite a bit as he moved up the professorial ranks. Aside from domestic travels, we also ventured abroad, for sabbatical leaves in Brussels and, later, in Naples. When I was ten, my father was offered a job at Northwestern University and we moved to Evanston, Illinois, where I attended the local public high school and college at Northwestern University.
At Northwestern, I acted in plays, while majoring in the Oral Interpretation of Literature. Soon, my writing was far more important to me than my acting. I graduated early and, at twenty years old, moved to New York City. A few weeks later, my father died, at 47, of cirrhosis of the liver. For the next year, I read voraciously, living off a modest inheritance. The following year, I was accepted as a fellow of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School.
For the next decade, I worked the graveyard shift as a legal proofreader at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. I also tutored high school kids for the SAT. All the while, I wrote hundreds and hundreds pages of prose, which, as I was without an agent, went largely unread. At the end of the 1980's, weary of poverty, I moved to Los Angeles to write screenplays.
Within a year of arriving here, I was making a living as a screenwriter. Within a few more years, I was making a great living. But a living is not a life. That’s when I decided to return to my roots and write fiction. It was only after I had done this that I began to see my screenplays filmed in a way that brought me pride and satisfaction.
