Within Arm's Reach

Ann Napolitano (born October 21, 1971) is an American writer who has written several novels. She attended and graduated from Connecticut College before getting her MFA at New York University. According to Napolitano, she wrote two novels when she was in her twenties that did not do well. Then, when she was in her thirties, she began writing Within Arm’s Reach, using her mother’s Irish Catholic family as inspiration. Her grandmother, Ann Catharine McNamara, was the inspiration for Catharine McLaughlin, being “a tiny, iron-strong woman who refused Novocain at the dentist and went to Catholic mass every Sunday. She gave birth to nine children, six of whom survived to adulthood” (318). In addition, Napolitano’s grandmother did not show strong emotions or her inner life and was “efficient and composed” (318).

Napolitano published Within Arm’s Reach in 2004 at 32, and though she was happy to get it published, it did not get much attention until almost two decades later. In 2011, she published the historical fiction novel A Good Hard Look, about American author Flannery O’Connor. She then published Dear Edward in 2020, which follows a 12-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of a plane crash.