History has never meant a dull recounting of dates and wars for Lynn Cullen. She was trained to love the subject as a child, when her father led his large family on camping trips across the United States every summer, excursions that centered around learning about the lives of the women and men who shaped the world. By visiting their childhood homes or the places where they struggled to make their mark, Cullen was taught at an early age to seek the real people behind their legend.

As an adult, her way of trying to understand the people who intrigue her is to write a novel about them. She continues the practice, taught to her by her father, of visiting the places where her subjects lived, loved, and worked, to better know them. She makes a point of going to most of the scenes in her books, be it Amsterdam (I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter), Spain (The Creation of Eve), Belgium (Reign of Madness), New York (Mrs. Poe), Tuscany (Twain’s End), Minnesota (The Sisters of Summit Avenue), Denmark (The Woman with the Cure), or Manhattan (When We were Brilliant). She has built a life around learning about people from other times and places, taking her own family on her missions.

All of her novels start with a question. In the case of When We Were Brilliant, it was who was the woman behind the most famous face in the world? Cullen had longed to understand Marilyn Monroe since she was eight years old, when she saw her in The Seven Year Itch. Even at that young age, she felt a tenderness toward the enigmatic woman who so lightly flitted away from those who would entrap her. Decades later, she was surprised to see a unique side of Marilyn in the photographs by documentarian Eve Arnold, the only woman photographer for whom Marilyn chose to sit, and the seed for When We Were Brilliant took root.

Cullen’s nationally and internationally bestselling novels have been translated into 17 languages and are the recipients of various honors, including the NPR Great Read, ALA Best Book of the Year, Oprah Book of the Week, People Magazine Book of the Week, and Indie Next Selection. She lives in Atlanta when not traveling to seek the unseen within the legends we thought we knew.