Cabot, Meg

Author

B orn Meggin Patricia Cabot, February 1, 1967, in Bloomington, IN; daughter of A. Victor (a college professor) and Barbara Cabot; married Benjamin D. Egnatz (a financial writer), April 1, 1993. Education: Indiana University, B.A., 1991.

Addresses: Agent—Laura Langlie, 275 President St., Ste. 3, Brooklyn, NY 11231. Contact—Meg Cabot, P.O. Box 4904, Key West, FL 33041-4904. Home—Key West, FL.

Career

A ssistant dormitory manager, New York University, c. 1991-2000; published first novel, Where Roses Grow Wild, as Patricia Cabot, 1998; signed with HarperCollins to publish The Princess Diaries, 1999; The Princess Diaries adapted into a feature film by Walt Disney Pictures, 2001; signed with the Scholastic Corporation to publish books for children and young adults, 2007.

Sidelights

M eg Cabot writes the immensely successful Princess Diaries young-adult novels, about an ordinary teen who is stunned to learn she is heir to the throne of a small European kingdom. The first in the series appeared in 2000, went on to spend the better part of a year on the New York Times bestseller list, and was translated for the big screen into an equally profitable film franchise. Cabot is a prolific writer who produced at least one Princess sequel every year for the next decade, while also writing other teen-friendly tales that have earned her a devoted, ardent following. Her book’s “heroines,” noted Sunday Times journalist Amanda Craig, “are ordinary girls who discover they are a princess, or a psychic, or an all-American girl who happens to save the president’s life, and who then have to deal with the commonplace problems of envy, ostracism, loneliness, and confusion.”

Born in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1967, Cabot was a writer at an early age, faithfully keeping a diary and progressing on to writing short stories in her teens. Her mother worked as an illustrator and her father was a professor of business and computer science in their college town. In an article Cabot wrote for CosmoGirl in 2005, she confessed that her genial and well-liked father was actually an alcoholic who hid bottles of bourbon throughout the house—which Cabot and her brothers would then discard when they found them. “Dad insisted he didn’t have a problem, and Mom, like so many spouses of alcoholics, didn’t know what to do about it—so she did nothing,” Cabot wrote. “We spent many Christmas Eves pushing the family car out of whatever ditch my dad had managed to drive it into after refusing to let Mom drive, insisting he was ‘fine.’” Finally, her father agreed to enter a substance abuse treatment program, and the family all underwent counseling.

Cabot earned a fine-arts degree from her hometown’s Indiana University and moved to New York City in late 1990. She intended to pursue a career as an illustrator, but had a difficult time finding work in the highly competitive job field. “It was really intimidating and awful,” she told Kristin Kloberdanz in an interview that appeared in Book. Eventually she found a secure job—with the added perk of a free Manhattan apartment, too—at New York University as an assistant manager for one of its undergraduate dormitories. She also began writing short stories and found success in 1998 when St. Martin’s Press published her first romance novel, Where Roses Grow Wild, under the pseudonym Patricia Cabot.

The kernel of a story that blossomed into the The Princess Diaries had its roots in the discomfort Cabot felt when her widowed mother began dating one of her former college professors. In original draft of the story, New York City teenager Mia Thermopolis is merely a tomboy unnerved by the fact that her mother is involved with Mia’s math teacher at Albert Einstein High School. When Cabot’s friend read it as a favor and confessed it was a little dull, Cabot decided to turn it into a lost-royalty fable—a staple of myths and fairy tales throughout the history of literature.

Cabot’s manuscript was rejected by several U.S. publishers before HarperCollins finally agreed in 1999 to publish it; however, before it went to press, Disney acquired the film rights and the filming of the story was set to begin a month before The Princess Diaries appeared in print. After the novel was published in October of 2000, Cabot’s book went on to spent 38 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. In one of its first reviews, Booklist’s Chris Sherman asserted that, in her young-adult debut, Cabot demonstrated “a knack for creating fully realized teen and adult characters that readers will miss when the story ends.” Thanks to the book’s success, however, the saga of Mia Thermopolis and her unexpected destiny would not be coming to an end in the foreseeable future.

The Princess Diaries introduces readers to Mia, her best friend Lilly, and her cat Fat Louie through Mia’s journal entries. A tomboy and a vegetarian who is deeply interested in environmental issues, Mia is also a typical 15year-old with a crush on two boys, one of whom is Lilly’s brother. Every summer, her mother ships her off to the palatial estate in France where her formidable “Grandmere” lives; this also gives Mia the chance to spend time with her father, whom she believes is a politician in Genovia, a small but wealthy European principality between France and Italy. Cabot’s fictional kingdom shares several similarities with the actual principality of Monaco, also wedged between France and Italy. For more than a quarter-century it also had an American-born princess in the form of film star Grace Kelly, who married Monaco’s reigning prince in 1956 in one of the most famous weddings of the twentieth century.

In the first Princess Diaries book, Mia learns she is heir to the throne when father reveals that, because of recent medical setbacks, he cannot produce any more children. He says that he is actually the Crown Prince of Genovia, and Grandmere is the current ruler. Mia, then, is next in the line of succession. The rest of the book chronicles her struggle to accept this news and maintain some semblance of a “normal” life back in the United States. “Wrapped up in the pink and glitter is a surprisingly tough, old-fashioned message to adolescent girls about keeping your sense of your own self-worth, being loyal to your friends and resolutely independent of the images of youth promulgated by pop stars,” declared Craig in the Sunday Times article.

Cabot’s debut young-adult novel became even more of a success when the movie version proved a box-office hit and launched the career of Anne Hathaway, who played Mia. Cabot was still working at New York University when the movie premiered, but left the job and, eventually, New York City thanks to the success of her teen novels. Mia’s saga continued through ten books, including the fourth installment, Princess in Waiting, 2004’s Perfect Princess, and the ninth and penultimate sequel, Princess Mia, published in 2007. This last-cited title finds Mia in her senior year of high school but troubled by relationship issues and a long-buried secret in Genovian political history.

Cabot has written several other books for young adults, including those in “The Mediator” series, under the pen name Jenny Carroll, and others aimed at a slightly older readership, such as Queen of Babble, a 2006 tale of a young woman looking for romance on a European sojourn. Cabot has fared less well in adapting her own work for the big screen. A short story that became the 2005 Michelle Trachtenberg movie Ice Princess is one example. She submitted several drafts before giving up, characterizing the process as “60 studio executives telling me what to do,” in an interview with Sue Corbett for Publishers Weekly. “It was clear a death was going to occur if I ever did that again.” Cabot noted in the same interview that “there are two types of writers: egg layers and egg polishers. I am such an egg layer. I turn in the first draft and I’m done. They come back to me with revisions, and I hate them. I know this sounds terrible, but the idea of working on a book for more than a month? That’s torture.” Cabot writes from Key West, Florida, where she lives with her husband, Ben Egnatz. They left New York City after the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, and lucked into a unique, mural-filled home that dates back to 1860 and is one of the oldest buildings in Florida. The resort town of Key West, meanwhile, suits Cabot’s requirements as an ideal place to live. One important factor is that the town—the southernmost zip code in the continental United States—is bike-friendly, because Cabot has never learned to drive.

Cabot and Egnatz eloped in 1993, telling their friends and families that they were vacationing in Europe. Instead they had made prior arrangements to wed in a small town in the Italian Riviera—the very same place that would fill in for Mia’s Gen-ovia a few years later. There was no bridal shower, department-store gift registry, nor bachelor and bachelorette parties, but in an article Cabot penned for Marie Claire, she asserted that “we were happy to trade all that for what we did get—a bridal wreath of garlic flowers made by the local children, which materialized outside our door on our wedding day and the moonlit serenade beneath our bedroom window that evening—courtesy of the soccer team” coached by the mayor who had married them earlier in the day.

Cabot’s official Web site scores hundreds of individual hits every day, and her e-mail inbox tallies as many as 200 letters on some days. With her devoted readership and pitch-perfect ear for teen angst, Cabot is sometimes compared to Judy Blume, the popular young-adult novelist whose books were best sellers in the 1970s. Cabot even contributed a chapter to the anthology Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, a 2007 collection of essays by female writers chronicling their own teenage devotion to much-loved Blume titles like Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret? and Forever. Cabot’s essay “Cry, Linda, Cry: Judy Blume’s Blubber and the Cruelest Thing in the World,” recounted how Blume’s 1974 novel about cliquish female bullying, Blubber, helped her come to terms with the mean classmate who bullied her when they were ten-year-olds. “I was willing to let others have their way in an effort to get them to like me,” Cabot confessed, and said that reading Blume’s book helped her become a bit more assertive. Her bully then backed off, and from then on Cabot made it a habit to defend classmates who were targeted by others.

Cabot easily recalls these vivid details from her life because of the diaries and journals she has kept so faithfully over the years. In an article she penned for CosmoGirl, she wrote how miraculous it was that she could flip back to a night in February of 1983 and revisit what was troubling her: eating too many Oreos while babysitting and fretting over a boy. She also said that she has carted the several milk crates that hold her diaries and notebooks from home to home across several states, and even paid for storage facilities at times. “While they’re valuable to me now as a source of material for the books I write to make a living, they have always been even more valuable—priceless, actually—as the emotional connection between the girl I used to be,” she notes, “to the woman I’ve become.”

Selected Writings

“The Princess Diaries” novels

The Princess Diaries, HarperTeen (New York City), 2000.

The Princess Diaries Volume II: Princess in the Spotlight, HarperTeen, 2001.

The Princess Diaries Volume III: Princess in Love, HarperTeen, 2002.

The Princess Diaries Volume IV: Princess in Waiting, HarperTeen, 2003.

The Princess Diaries Volume IV and a Half: Project Princess, HarperCollins, 2003.

Princess Lessons, HarperTeen, 2003.

Perfect Princess, HarperTeen, 2004.

The Princess Diaries Volume V: Princess in Pink, Harp-erTeen, 2004.

Mia Tells It like It Is (contains The Princess Diaries and The Princess Diaries Volume II: Princess in the Spotlight), HarperTeen, 2004.

The Highs and Lows of Being Mia (contains The Princess Diaries Volume III: Princess in Love and The Princess Diaries Volume IV: Princess in Waiting), HarperTeen, 2004.

The Princess Diaries Volume VI: Princess in Training, HarperTeen, 2005.

The Princess Diaries Volume VII and a Half: Sweet Sixteen Princess, HarperTeen, 2006.

The Princess Diaries Volume VII: Party Princess, Harp-erCollins, 2006.

Valentine Princess: A Princess Diaries Book, Harper-Teen, 2007.

The Princess Diaries Volume VIII: Princess on the Brink, HarperTeen, 2007.

The Princess Diaries Volume IX: Princess Mia, Harper-Teen, 2007.

“The Mediator” Series” under pseudonym Jenny Carroll

Shadowland, HarperTeen, 2000.

Ninth Key, HarperTeen, 2001.

Reunion, HarperTeen, 2001.

Darkest Hour, HarperTeen, 2001.

Haunted, HarperTeen, 2003.M

Twilight, HarperTeen, 2005.

Other

All American Girl, HarperCollins (New York City), 2002.

(As Meggin Cabot) The Boy Next Door (first in the “Boy” series), HarperCollins, 2002.

Nicola and the Viscount, Avon (New York City), 2002.

(As Meggin Cabot) She Went All the Way, Avon, 2002.

Victoria and the Rogue, Avon, 2003.

(As Meggin Cabot) Boy Meets Girl (second in the “Boy” series), Avon, 2004.

Teen Idol, HarperCollins, 2004.

Holiday Princess (nonfiction), illustrated by Chesley McLaren, HarperTeen, 2005.

Every Boy’s Got One (third in the “Boy” series),Avon, 2005.

Ready or Not: An All-American Girl Novel, Harper-Collins, 2005.

Avalon High, HarperCollins, 2006.

How to Be Popular, HarperTempest (New York City), 2006.

(As Jenny Carroll) Missing You (fifth in the 1-800Where-R-You? series), HarperTeen, 2006.

Queen of Babble, William Morrow (New York City), 2006.

Size 12 Is Not Fat: A Heather Wells Mystery, Avon, 2006.

Size 14 Is Not Fat Either, Avon, 2006.

Pants on Fire, HarperTeen, 2007.

Also author of romance novels under pseudonym Patricia Cabot, beginning with Where Roses Grow Wild, published by St. Martin’s Press, 1998; also author of “1-800Where-R-You” series under pseudonym Jenny Carroll; contributor of “Cry, Linda, Cry: Judy Blume’s Blubber and the Cruelest Thing in the World” to Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, edited by Jennifer O’Connell, Pocket Books, 2007.

Sources

Books

“Cry, Linda, Cry: Judy Blume’s Blubber and the Cruelest Thing in the World,” in Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, Pocket Books (New York City), 2007.

Periodicals

Book, March-April 2003, p. 34.

Booklist, September 15, 2000, p. 233.

CosmoGirl, December 2005, p. 152; February 2007, p. 114.

Marie Claire, June 2005, p. 240.

New York Times, August 3, 2001.

Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006, p. 62.

Sunday Times (London, England), October 10, 2004, p. 9.

—Carol Brennan