Hi! I’m Taylor Hahn.

I’m the author of two novels: The Lifestyle—a June 2022 Book of the Month pick—and A Home for the Holidays, publishing September 2024. I’m also a lawyer and a mom.

I’ve always loved to write. In the seventh grade, I wrote about an orange falling in love with a pineapple on a remote island that included the line, “She really got my juices flowing.” When I read it aloud for the class, all the boys fell out of their chairs laughing. I did not understand why that was funny.

I kept writing. In high school I wrote a romantic comedy screenplay starring two lawyers in New York (big Ally McBeal fan over here) and serialised fiction titled “BFF”

in the school paper about a girl secretly in love with her best guy friend. (Sensing a theme? I was desperate for love.)

But I never understood how to make writing a career. I didn’t know any writers. My favorite books seemed to appear in my local Borders like pots of gold, their authors mythical creatures. Writing felt so inaccessible to me.

In college at Loyola Marymount University, I spent my freshman year as a screenwriting major, but I was the only girl in most of my classes and that made me feel like an imposter. I wrote my silly love stories—one about a girl with a magic bicycle she rode toward true love, another about a hopeful writer falling in love with her English TA over their shared love of fiction—then gave up and switched my major to psychology. I became a second grade teacher in Brooklyn, then packed up my dreams and went to Fordham Law School. I am nothing if not practical. Plus, I was obsessed with The West Wing.

But law school changed my life. Debt aside, it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I realized I did belong in spaces that had never felt open to me before. Spaces that belonged to men, to smart people, to fictional TV characters. I got a job in “Big Law” with an office in Times Square and worked harder than I ever thought I was capable of. I met my husband there and we got married in 2016.

I never lost that itch to write though. Needing that creative outlet, I started taking writing classes with The Center for Fiction, Catapult, and Sackett Street. When I had the idea for The Lifestyle, I became obsessed. I wrote every weekend. I had no social life. I was writing for the girl who’d given up her dreams because she was too afraid.

After years of infertility, I gave birth to my baby girl in December 2022, ten months after losing my mom to alcoholism. I found out I was pregnant for the first time just six weeks after she died. Life is beautiful and devastating like that. I’m so madly in love with my daughter it physically aches in my heart, and I think about my mom every time I hold her. My mom held me the same way.

When I was little, my mom made Christmas magic feel so real. Santa was never just a pile of presents under the tree. I heard his sleigh bells, heard the thump of reindeer hooves on the roof. One year, he spoke to me through the chimney. Because of her, I still believe in Santa a little! I wrote A Home for the Holidays from a place of deep grief in honor of the joy we felt at Christmas. It’s a love letter and an apology, a romance and a reimagining, the redemptive goodbye we never got to have. It’s also a tribute to music and so much more. I hope you’ll read it!

With love,

Taylor