Ethlie Ann Vare

Early life

Ethlie Ann Herman was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and grew up in Greenwich Village in New York City. She attended the Bronx High School of Science where she was a National Merit Scholar, then moved to England and attended Bedales School, leaving at age 16. She attended the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating with a bachelor's degree in world literature at 19. She was convicted of possession of drugs with intent to sell and was sent to California Institute for Women in Frontera, California.

Rock music journalism

After completing her prison sentence, she met and married the British rock drummer Barry Charles Vare and had a son, Russell Alexander Vare. The family moved to Nevada City, California, where she got a job at the local newspaper, The Mountain Messenger, in 1978. Her weekly pop music column, "Rock On" was soon picked up for national syndication and led to higher profile writing work, including concert reviews for Billboard magazine. Work led her to Los Angeles, California, in 1983, where she became the editor of ROCK magazine, a reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, and a contributor to Elle, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal among others. She also had her own "daily dose of rock & roll dish" on E!'s The Gossip Show.

Television writing

Her first teleplay was a music-themed freelance episode of the action-adventure series, Renegade. She soon became a staff writer for Renegade, Silk Stalkings, Players and Earth: Final Conflict, then Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, Adventure Inc. and The Hallmark Mysteries: Jane Doe. Her made-for-television movie, Something Beneath, won a Platinum Remy Award and an episode of CSI:Crime Scene Investigation about women in prison (“XX”) which was proposed for an Emmy Award nomination in 2004.

Non-fiction books

Vare's first book was published under a pseudonym when she was 17 years old. "It was a virgin's idea of what pornography sounds like," she later remarked. Her first legitimate release was the pop-star biography Everything You Wanted to Know About. . . Stevie Nicks, co-written with reporter Ed Ochs when Vare was a talent correspondent at Billboard. Now a collector's item, the paperback sells at online auctions for $200 or more. In 1986, Vare wrote another musical biography: Ozzy Osbourne, for the Ballantine Books series Monsters of Metal.

Inspired by a ROCK magazine article about the Monkees band member Michael Nesmith's mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper, ROCK editors Vare and Greg Ptacek co-wrote the "pop history" Mothers of Invention: Forgotten Women and their Unforgettable Ideas in 1988, followed in 1993 by Women Inventors and Their Discoveries, aimed at a middle-school readership. Vare later wrote a book for grade-school readers, Adventurous Spirit: A Story about Ellen Swallow Richards, about America's first female professional chemist. In 2001, Vare and Ptacek reunited for the sequel Patently Female.

Vare has written or edited biographies of pop culture figures including Frank Sinatra, Tom Cruise, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. Her only novel is The Broken Places (published in 2004), co-written with Daniel Morris and set in the universe of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.

Vare's 2011 release is also her most autobiographical, Love Addict: Sex, Romance and Other Dangerous Drugs (HCI Books, 2011), which developed out of her blog Affection Deficit Disorder. Love Addict is her eleventh published book, the first on the subject of addiction, something she has experienced firsthand. “It is,” she says, “a funny book about a serious subject.”

Works

Non-fiction:

Television

Movies:

Novels: