Gayle Forman

About Gayle Forman

Gayle Forman was born in Los Angeles and began her career as a journalist, writing for Seventeen magazine about youth and social issues before freelancing for publications including Details, Glamour, Elle, and Cosmopolitan. A round-the-world trip with her husband in 2002 became the basis for her first book, a work of nonfiction, before she turned to writing novels for teenagers. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Forman's fiction is known for tackling grief, identity, and first love with emotional directness, often set against real-world backdrops drawn from her journalism background.

Notable Works

If I Stay (2009), about a teenage girl deciding whether to live after a car accident kills her family, became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a 2014 film starring Chloë Grace Moretz. Its sequel, Where She Went, and the later Just One Day series further established Forman as a major voice in YA fiction. I Was Here (2015) tackled teen suicide, while Frankie & Bug (2021) is a middle-grade novel set during a hot Los Angeles summer in 1987.

Book Challenges

Forman's novels have repeatedly drawn objections from parents and school boards over mature content. If I Stay has been challenged for graphic scenes and language, Just One Day was removed from at least one Minnesota district as unsuited to its age group, and I Was Here was pulled pending investigation by an Oklahoma school district in 2021. In this catalog, Forman's books are recorded as banned across 7 states and 17 districts, part of the broader surge in school library challenges to young adult fiction in recent years.