Nadine Dajani's Fashionably Late: Women's Fiction Gone Global

For most people, “where are you from” is a fairly simple question with a straightforward answer. If you were to ask Nadine this, you’d better settle into a comfy couch, a glass of chilled chardonnay in hand, and steel yourself for a lecture in global geopolitics. Because this might take a while. (Then again, Nadine’s friends will tell you, if you ask her anything, it might take a while.) Luckily she’s found her calling in a career where being a verbose know-it-all is actually considered a good thing.

Nadine was born in Beirut, Lebanon (she’s not saying when, but suffice to say it was some time after the city’s fall from glittering, Paris-of-the East status and well into the country’s devastating civil war). As the daughter of Palestinian refugees she got to experience the joys of international travel without, you know, a passport, as these were the days before the infamous Bill Clinton-presided Arafat-Rabin handshake when Palestinians were being referred to as “stateless”. To make matters even more complicated for future boyfriends, well-meaning acquaintances and census bureau interviewers, Nadine’s father moved the family to the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during the country’s Roaring Oil Boom 80s. For the next nine years the family would shuttle between the arid, forbidding culture and landscape of the Saudi desert (during the school year), and live-every-minute-as-though-it-were-your-last (because it really could be), Lebanon (for those precious few summers the assorted militias would take a break from killing each other and/or when Israel wasn’t busy invading). Read More

When a decade had elapsed without the war showing any signs of abating, Nadine’s family, along with many other sensible Arabs, made the difficult decision to Go West. (Why her parents settled on the très français Montreal when no one in the family could speak French is beyond her. At least she can now pronounce things like Façonnable and crème brûlée with true parisienne wannabe flair.)

Nadine grew up loving all things right-brained – fine arts, fashion, sketching, reading, writing. So, naturally, when it came time to pick a college major, she went with accounting. Sucked into the rat race before she even graduated (whoever came up with the idea of summer internships doing office work should be taken out to a field and beaten senseless with a bat, Goodfellas style), she was living for nights out clubbing with the girls and shoe shopping (or any kind of shopping, really).

One Certified Management Accountant designation and six months of soul-sucking office drudgery later, she took her first trip to Varadero, Cuba (yes, it’s a hotspot tourist destination to rival the likes of Cancun and Ibiza, I promise). The week-long jaunt would rekindle memories of the joie-de-vivre-in-the-face-of-difficulty attitude of her native Lebanon, of simpler times when summers were meant for ogling hot guys all day, not beefing up your resume.

Utterly mesmerized but fairly realistic about the whole throwing-caution-to-the-wind-and-moving-to-Cuba idea, Nadine managed to reconcile her analytical, no-nonsense inclinations with her Havana daydreaming with a little bit of creative thinking... In 2002 she moved to the Cayman Islands to work in the offshore banking industry.

This was right about the time Helen Fielding and Sophie Kinsella hit it big in America and Nadine discovered chick lit (AKA: contemporary humorous women’s fiction), a collection of books that combined such weighty themes as fulfillment and self-discovery with hilarious tales of shopping and manhunting, among other things. It was a revelation. She got to work on Fashionably Late, joined RWA, met her lovely critique partners, and harassed her poor husband, relatives, and friends with pleas to proof read draft after pathetic draft until the manuscript was polished to presentable, go-out-into-the-world form.

With the closest shopping mall sitting across the sea in Miami, Nadine was sadly bereft of her chief distraction. So she decided to pursue another life-long dream (because, let’s face it, there’s only so much sunbathing one person can do). She signed up for a fashion marketing degree at LaSalle College where her first assignment was to come up with a line of handbags. She nearly wept with joy.

She continued to work, study, and write, and in November 2005, received two offers of representation from her two ‘dream’ agents. A few months later, her first-ever manuscript (although it’s been revised so many times it hardly qualifies as ‘first’ anymore) sold to Tor/Forge books, 'a division of St. Martin's Press.

Nadine will continue to believe this is an elaborate hoax staged by her so-called loved ones until she actually sees Fashionably Late hit the shelves in June 2007.