Nancy Steinbeck

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Nancy Steinbeck is the co-author of the dual memoir The Other Side of Eden which includes the posthumous autobiography of John Steinbeck IV, son of the beloved American author. Writer Magazine named the book among the top ten for 2001.

She was a musical child prodigy, but decided to pursue careers in writing and social work. After attending the prestigious Lowell High School in San Francisco, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, and completed the graduate-level coursework at the University of California, San Diego for her CADAC certification. She shares a unique history with a small group of San Francisco teenagers as being one of the original Haight-Ashbury hippies.

Nancy spent a decade traveling around the world and living abroad, in Kathmandu, on a commune in British Columbia, and in a tiny mountain village in Mexico. She has worked as a therapist with hard core delinquents at the San Francisco Juvenile Hall and drug addicts at Scripps McDonald Center in La Jolla, California, as well as in private practice. She and John met in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975, where they studied Tibetan Buddhism at Naropa University with Chogyam Trungpa, the notorious renegade lama. Their divorce in 1989 created a healing crisis for John's alcoholism. He remained sober for the final three years of his life by attending 12-Step Meetings with a large group of their friends. John and Nancy continued to live together with her two children, who had taken John's last name, until the day he died in 1991, when he asked her to complete his autobiography.

Upon John's untimely death, due to complications from back surgery, Nancy moved to a remote area of the Ozark Mountains, where she lives on a 250-acre (1.0 km²) ranch. She continues to write and speak at colleges and universities, as well as rural schools, about the craft of memoir writing and dysfunctional family systems.