Uh oh - writing about myself has got to be one of my least favourite activities ever! But (deep breath)...

I was born in London, jetted over to New York with my parents when I was six weeks old, and have been hopping between the two cities ever since.

I spent all my high school and college years in the UK, surrounded by kids just like the YLF clique. (Well, maybe not quite as mean. But definitely just as outrageous.) My high school in London was called Westminster, and it was kind of a ridiculous place. It was founded in 1560 by Queen Elizabeth I, has a bunch of insane traditions, and is located right behind Westminster Abbey. In fact, we used to have our school assemblies in the Abbey three times week. I'm not sure I realized how awesome that was back when I was sixteen. My friends and I spent most of our time plotting how to sneak out of school, rather than admiring our surroundings while we were there...

After graduating, I couldn't wait to get away from England (and my parents - no offence, parents!) so I took a gap year before heading to university. The idea was to go to France to learn fluent French. But (predictably) I spent my 5 months in Paris mostly hanging out with English friends in cafes, bars, museums and parks. Oh, and doing a little shopping too... I also took a French cooking course at Le Cordon Bleu (that's the famous Parisian cooking school featured in the movie Julie and Julia). I did learn to cook in the end, but in the meantime I managed to burn eggs, poison my friends with semi-raw chicken, and miss my final exam. Yep, I was probably the worst student the school has ever had.

Luckily, I'm a bit better at reading books than at feeding people, so for university I studied English at Clare College, Cambridge. I absolutely adored it. Clare's a gorgeous little college right on the river. When I was in my Third Year, I could look out my dorm window and watch boats punting past on the water down below.

After Cambridge, I needed to take a break from studying before my head exploded, so I travelled to Rome, where I taught English for a year and learnt to speak fluent Italian (not to mention make a great spaghetti carbonara).

Then it was off to New York to get a Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia. You'd think that having two degrees would mean it'd be easy to get a job. Nope. After graduating, I was broke and unemployed for six whole months, until someone at GQ magazine finally took pity on me and gave me a chance.

So, a magazine - glamorous, right? Kind of... I got to do a ton of cool stuff, such as interviewing cute young actors like James McAvoy and Justin Long - but there was a lot of mind-numbing work, too: answering phones. Opening mail. Running errands. Booking other people's plane tickets.

So, in my time off, I started writing my own stuff. I'd come home from the office and get down to three or four hours more work at home. It was pretty exhausting, to say the least! But I knew I wanted to write fiction, so I stuck it out. And after a year of living this double life, everything changed. At 7 a.m. on the morning on my 27th birthday, my phone rang, I blearily picked it up - and there was my agent on the other end, telling me I'd just been offered a book deal for Young, Loaded & Fabulous! Needless to say, it was the best present of my life...