Helen is serving a life sentence at Sloatsburg women's prison for the murder of her children. Dr. Louise Forrest, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, is the new chief of psychiatry there. Captain Ike Bradshaw is the corrections officer who wants her. And Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet contacted by Helen, is intent on nothing but fame. Drawing these four characters together in a story of shocking and disturbing revelations, The Big Girls is an electrifying novel about the anarchy of families, the sometimes destructive power of maternal instinct, and the cult of celebrity. Susanna Moore is an American writer and teacher. Born in Pennsylvania but raised in Hawaii, Moore worked as a model and script reader in Los Angeles and New York City before beginning her career as a writer. Her first novel, My Old Sweetheart, published in 1982, earned a PEN Hemingway nomination, and won the Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She followed this with The Whiteness of Bones in 1989, and her third novel, Sleeping Beauties, in 1993. All three of these novels were set in Hawaii and charted dysfunctional family relationships. Moore gained particular critical notice for her fourth novel, In the Cut (1995), which was adapted into a 2003 feature film of the same name by director Jane Campion.