In the works
Gaters
Women's Fiction
Meredith Evans has spent her adult life making herself small. She told herself it was survival. She never asked what she was really keeping contained.
Until the pandemic moves her family to The Golden Gates, a gleaming gated community in Boca Raton where keeping to yourself is a violation of community standards.
Lured by the promise of a fresh start—and the female friendships she's never let herself want—Meredith begins to Bocarize: blending in, buying in, and bending the knee to the community's queen bee. Until she accidentally outshines her, and her membership in the elite club is revoked, her family's along with it.
But there's an alligator in her community's lake, biding its time, and something in Meredith that's been doing the same...
Told with wit, bite, and unexpected heart, GATERS is an adult mean-girls tale about the price of belonging, the danger of reinvention, and what it costs a woman to finally let herself be known.
ABOUT
Heather Siegel is the author of two memoirs and is currently at work on her novel, GATERS.
A lifelong outsider shaped by an unusual childhood, Heather grew up watching from the margins—an accidental anthropologist drawn to the invisible dynamics of families, friendships, and belonging. That instinct led her to pursue an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at The New School and continues to inform her storytelling with wit, humor, and social insight.
A recipient of national and independent awards and honors, her coming-of-age memoir OUT FROM THE UNDERWORLD was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and her follow-up, THE KING & THE QUIRKY won the Next Generation Indie Book Award’s Gold Medal for Women’s Issues, both receiving critical acclaim. Her essays have appeared in HuffPost Personal, Salon, The Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop, The Belladonna Comedy, and numerous literary journals and anthologies.
Originally from California and New York, Heather now lives in South Florida, where she coaches student writers and walks her Golden Retriever through the Everglades—always on the lookout for what doesn’t quite belong.
AWARDS & RECOGNITION
The King & The Quirky
GOLD MEDAL - NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD - WOMEN'S ISSUES CATEGORY
Out from the Underworld
FINALIST - FOREWORD INDIES BOOK OF THE YEAR
National & Independent Honors
Sarah Cottrell
Huffington Post Books
Heather Siegel is a master storyteller like none I have encountered.
Phillip Lopate
A graduate summa cum laude of the school of hard knocks, Heather Siegel has written this dark, riveting memoir with refreshing if mordant humor, rueful tenderness and compassion. She is a stunningly gifted storyteller
Vivian Gornick
Heather Siegel has taken the raw material of an unusually deranged childhood, and done with it what very few can do: fashioned a piece of writing so smart, funny, and insightful that, as we read, we see the narrator growing from a street-smart little cynic into a remarkably understanding woman. More one cannot ask of any memoirist.
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