Robin and Renée
grew up
outside Philadelphia, PA in the very latest part of the twentieth
century. She attended Princeton University where she majored in
English, quickly realizing that she couldn’t bluff her way
through Organic Chemistry, but she did have a very convincing English
accent. Upon graduation, Epstein moved to New York to pursue a career
in stand-up comedy – a decision that nearly killed her parents
and, on bad nights, an audience member or two. While playing nightly
in clubs throughout New York, she worked a day job in advertising
and enrolled in the writing program at Columbia University. After
dropping out (Oh, the parental disappointment!) and back in again
(Thank God!), she finally earned her MFA in nonfiction. Epstein
eventually found her way into a sitcom writing room and worked on
several network shows taking her from New York to Chicago to Los
Angeles. She also served as the head writer on a game show for teenage
girls on the Oxygen network, where she appeared as the on-air sidekick
known--to the three people who watched-- as Guru Robin. The Guru
began writing freelance magazine pieces shortly thereafter,
wrote a series of children’s books for Scholastic called
The Groovy Girls, and is currently scripting video games and teaching a course at NYU.
While writing SHAKING HER ASSETS, her first novel,
Renée was a television producer in New York, most recently at 60 Minutes II
on CBS (see the links to some of her stories in Other
Work), and currently freelancing. Before becoming a television journalist,
Renée worked in print, first as an editor for the now-defunct
magazine Gear, and then as a writer and editor for the weekly
newspaper The New York Observer. Renée graduated summa
cum laude, totally naïve and a little misguided from Princeton,
with a Bachelor’s in History and European Cultural studies.
She then graduated from Harvard Law School, a little less misguided
and thoroughly intent on never becoming a lawyer. In this, she’s
succeeded. She was born in Ithaca, New York, and grew up
between Ithaca and Paris, France, an odd back-and-forth between
redneck and highbrow, which probably still sums her up today.
Author photo by Michael Cantwell
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