What's New
I'm Writing a New Book!
Writing
I'm writing a novel based on the story from my latest NYT Modern Love essay, "My Mother’s Last, Best Gift Was an Astonishing Secret."
Memoir Workshop Registration Is Open!
Teaching
Registration is open for my memoir writing workshops. We begin a new, four-week cycle each month.
Featured Works
Novel
Everything Is Just Fine
2019, Grand Central Publishing
In this brilliant, laugh-out-loud satire, named one of Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Books of 2019, image-conscious parents on a Beverly Hills junior soccer team struggle to keep up appearances as their private lives careen out of control.
Novel
Mommies Who Drink
2007, Grand Central Publishing
With a poignant voice and a fresh style that makes this memoir read like the best women’s fiction, Paesel navigates new motherhood in all its forms–the ecstatic, the terrifying, the tedious, the hilarious, the transcendental, and the sticky.
Personal Essay
My Mother's Last, Best Gift Was An Astonishing Secret
2026, New York Times
It took my mother getting Alzheimer’s for my siblings and me to learn the truth about our family and childhood.
Image by Brian Rea
About Brett
Brett Paesel is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller, Mommies Who Drink: Sex, Drugs, and Other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom (Warner Books, 2006) as well as the novel, Everything is Just Fine (Grand Central, 2019). Her work has been published in numerous collections and national publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com. In Hollywood, she has been a consulting producer on Amazon’s television series, Emmy award winning, “Transparent” and “I Love Dick”. She has developed and written shows for HBO, ABC, Fox, Comedy Central, WB, Lifetime and Nick at Nite.
Brett is both a writing teacher and coach. She coaches writers’ rooms in a scriptwriting method based on Stanislavski technique and basic improvisation rules, specifically adapted for writers. In memoir and prose, she leans heavily into an approach called Aide Memoir. She has taught writing for Second City, Writing Pad, The LA Master Chorale, Young Arts, and Chicago Dramatists. Her private classes are small and geared toward developing writers who are professionally prepared and also actively engaged in a supportive artistic community.
As an actor, she was a cast member of Amazon’s “Transparent” (she played Rita) and HBO’s, “Mr. Show with Bob and David”.
