Larry Doyle is a 1976 graduate of Buffalo Grove High School, the setting for I Love You, Beth Cooper. He was not the valedictorian like the book’s protagonist, ranking only 13th out of 500, although several of the students above him took pretty easy classes.

Doyle has wandered through a checkered writing career that has seen him reporting on the early AIDS epidemic and the Challenger explosion, doing comic strips and editing magazines, writing for the best television show of all time, and scripting extremely expensive movies that lose gobs of money. He currently makes his living writing screenplays and writes for magazines whenever he can afford it.

Doyle lives in Baltimore with his wife Becky, their three children and one dog, until it dies, and then no more dogs, according to the wife. The wife’s sister is married to Campbell McGrath, the famous poet who won a MacArthur Super Genius Grant, and once hit his brother-in-law in the face with an oar and then wrote a poem about it.

In 2008, Doyle also won an award, which while no fucking genius grant, was a pretty darn good one.

Further Reading

Slate Diary, March 18-22, 1997, chronicling our move to Los Angeles and my first weeks on The Simpsons.

The Weiner, my eldest son’s, Esquire, June 1999

The Talk, me and my dad, Esquire, May 1998.

Naughty, Awful Boys, me and my brother, Esquire, June 1998

How to Become a Writer, parts I and II, written for the Powell’s Book Blog in 2007, which contains no helpful advice.

He is the son of Irish immigrants, who only recently have accepted that he will probably not become a doctor.