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Stories that live
in the margins 

Upmarket fiction and memoir at the intersection of family, belonging, and dark humor. 

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New Novel

Gaters

Upmarket Women's Fiction
in the works

Meredith Evans has spent her adult life making herself small. She told herself it was survival. She told herself it was safety. 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, and a queen bee decides to dismantle her.
 

Told with wit, bite, and unexpected heart, GATERS is a compulsively readable novel about the price of belonging, the danger of reinvention, and what it costs a woman to finally let herself be known.

ESSAYS & SHORT FICTION IN

Salon   

Huff Post Personal

The Belladonna Comedy

Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop

Literary Journals & Anthologies

ABOUT

Heather Siegel is the author of two memoirs and a debut upmarket women’s fiction novel. 
 

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 heart, humor, and social insight.

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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.​

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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

Out from the Underworld    

FINALIST  -  FOREWORD INDIES BOOK OF THE YEAR

The King & The Quirky

GOLD MEDAL  -  NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD  -  WOMEN'S ISSUES CATEGORY

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.

Stay in the story 

New essays, book news, and the occasional dispatch. 

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