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. In 2023, she released the Little Women–inspired novel Hello Beautiful, which explores the lives of the Padavano sisters. After learning that fans had struggled to find copies of Within Arm’s Reach, which had gone out of print, the novel was reissued in 2023 and became a national bestseller.

In addition to her novel writing, Napolitano has taught classes on writing fiction at Brooklyn College, New York University, and Gotham Writers Workshop and worked as an associate editor for One Story between 2014 and 2020. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Dan Wilde, and they have two sons, Malachy and Hendrix.