Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Then We Came to the End

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Then We Came to the End

Joshua Ferris writes: "I was born in 1974 in Danville, Illinois, a small town just over the Indiana border. I went back recently and the house where I grew up had taken something out of Alice in Wonderland and shrunk to half the size of what I remembered it being. In 1984 my mother, sister, brother and I moved with my step-father to Cudjoe Key, Florida, where I learned how to fish, boat, snorkel, and work. At ten I had my own landscaping company for Cudjoe residents happy to pay three bucks an hour to have their weeds pulled and lawns mowed. I had my first proper job at Godfather's Pizza in 1985, busing tables and washing dishes.

I moved back to Illinois, to Downers Grove, a suburb of Chicago, where I attended high school, after which I went to the University of Iowa, where I received a BA in English and Philosophy. I got my first job in advertising in 1998, at a Chicago firm called Davis Harrison Dion, and also worked for Draft Worldwide, before leaving Chicago for Long Beach, California and the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Then We Came to the End. It originally ran in April 2007 and has been updated for the February 2008 paperback edition. Go to magazine.