Allen Zadoff was born a blond and later developed into the arty, bald-headed guy depicted here.  His hometown is Boston, Mass, but he hasn’t been back there in over a decade and cannot answer questions about which restaurants are good in Harvard Square. He also does not have a cool Southie accent like Mark Wahlberg, not because he doesn’t want one, but because people did not have accents in the particular area where he grew up.

Allen went on to live in Manhattan, Tokyo, and Los Angeles.  His first love was the theater, and he was an actor in high school and Artistic Director of the undergraduate theater company at Cornell University.  He went to graduate school in stage directing at the Harvard University Institute for Advanced Theater Training.  These experiences, along with crushes on several actresses, inspired his book My Life, the Theater, and Other Tragedies.

He was also a fat kid.  Some people are shy about the word fat, but he is not.  The experience of being big in the world inspired two of his books, the young adult novel Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can’t Have which won the 2010 Sid Fleischman Humor Award and his memoir for adults, Hungry: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin.