Vendela Vida

Vendela Vida

Vendela Vida (born September 6, 1971) is an American novelist, journalist, and editor who lives in San Francisco with her husband, writer Dave Eggers. She graduated from San Francisco University High School in her hometown before attending Middlebury College as an undergraduate. She received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She has written three books, Girls on the Verge, And Now You Can Go, and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. She co-founded and co-edits the monthly periodical The Believer. She also edited The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.

Based on her Columbia thesis, 2000's Girls on the Verge examines modern coming-of-age rituals for young women, including gang initiations and sorority rushes (for the latter, she impersonated a prospective sorority sister).

Published in 2003, And Now You Can Go is a novel set in New York, San Francisco, and the Philippines, tracing the impulsive journeys of a young woman in the wake of an assault. In a Guardian article Vida voices her plan to author a trilogy of novels "on the subject of violence and rage." The second novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name takes place in Lapland and was published in 2007. At a reading of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name held in Manhattan on February 5th 2007, Vida stated that this trilogy will likely never take shape.

She has been married to novelist, memoirist, and publisher Dave Eggers since 2003. They are the parents of a daughter, October Adelaide Eggers Vida, born in October 2005. With Eggers, she is a co-founder and board member of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization that teaches creative writing to children and teens.