Eileen Goudge was born July 4, 1950 and grew up in the San Francisco bay area. She began writing at the age of eight. At eighteen, she ran off with a man dodging the draft, and a year later, returned home from British Columbia with a baby and broke. She began writing non-stop and managed to sell a few articles. In the early eighties, she was chosen to help launch a new line of teen romances, which became the successful "Sweet Valley High" series. She now had enough money to move to New York City so she took her two children and wrote the "Sweet Valley High" titles while working on a novel. Her first novel, "Garden of Lies," was sold in 1986 to Viking for nearly one million dollars. It's the story of a baby girl switched at birth by her own mother during a hospital fire. She produced three more novels and then wrote the sequel to "Garden of Lies" which is called "Thorns of Truth."
There are more than five million copies of her books in print, world-wide.