Melissa Bank, author of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, has died at age 61
Melissa Bank, the author best known for her 1999 best seller "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing," has died following a struggle with lung cancer, publisher Penguin Books confirmed. She was 61.https://t.co/FB1ACIFQAi
- USA TODAY (@USATODAY) August 4, 2022
Author Melissa Bank passed away on August 2 of lung cancer at the age of 61. She was best known for her 1999 collection of stories, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which spent 16 weeks on the New York Times best seller list and was considered a staple of chick lit.
She spent twelve years writing her debut book in her spare time while working full time as a copywriter. During this period, she was hit by a car while riding her bike. Despite wearing a helmet, she had post-concussion syndrome for almost two years which affected her short term memory, her vocabulary, and her sequential thinking. As a result, she could not read or write so she had to put her book on pause.
A movie adaptation based on two of the stories in the book ("My Old Man" and "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine") starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin was released in 2007. Francis Ford Coppola had the film rights to the last story in the book but did not end getting it past the development stage.
Bank's follow up book, The Wonder Spot, was published in 2005. She was a professor in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
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