Lauren Acampora’s short fiction and other writing has appeared in publications such as the Paris Review, Guernica, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Antioch Review, and LitHub. She is a graduate of Brown University, earned an MFA from Brooklyn College, and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Writers OMI International Residency, and the Ragdale Foundation.
She is the author of The Wonder Garden. Her latest book, The Paper Wasp (Grove Press) is a riveting, knife-edge story of two women’s dark friendship of twisted ambition, set against the backdrop of contemporary Hollywood. In small-town Michigan, Abby Graven leads a solitary life. Once a bright student on the cusp of a promising art career, she now languishes in her childhood home, trudging to and from her job as a supermarket cashier. Each day she is taunted from the magazine racks by the success of her former best friend Elise, a rising Hollywood starlet whose life in pictures Abby obsessively scrapbooks.
When Abby encounters Elise again at their high school reunion, she is surprised and warmed that Elise still considers her not only a friend, but a brilliant storyteller, and true artist. When Elise offhandedly tells Abby to look her up if she’s ever in LA, Abby soon arrives on her doorstep. There, Abby becomes enmeshed in Elise’s world, even as she guards her own dark secrets and desire for greatness. As she edges closer to Elise, and her own artistic ambitions, the dynamic shifts between the two friends—until Abby can see only one way to grasp the future that awaits her.