Meet Mel.
Mel West is an American author whose work and wide network of friends and family mean she, invariably, lives in between—between cities, between versions of herself, and between the lives she’s built and the ones she still imagines.
Though she currently splits her time internationally, she spends as much time as possible with her husband in their Zürich apartment, where she writes, reflects, and attempts to romanticize the chaos of modern adulthood.
Prior to relocating, Mel lived full-time in New York City, including the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic, thank you very much—a formative chapter that deeply shaped both her creative voice and her debut novel, Now is Not a Good Time for a Breakdown.
Her writing explores the tension between ambition and burnout, intimacy and independence, and stability and self-sabotage. She gravitates toward flawed, searching women who are trying to navigate life without a map—and with a lot of humor. Her stories are rooted in emotional honesty, dark wit, and the quiet reckonings that reshape a life from the inside out.
When she’s not writing, Mel works in the startup and entrepreneurial world, a background that had a heavy hand in her fascination with overachievement, identity, and the cost of constant forward motion. She is endlessly interested in psychology, modern romance, and the question of what this little thing we call life is really all about.
If she ever manages to settle in one place for longer than a season, she plans to adopt a chiweenie.
From the author
I grew up as a middle child in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, raised on rock ’n’ roll and the importance of being kind to everyone—but always with this sense that I didn’t quite fit the shape of my surroundings. Writing became the place where I could explore that tension, where I could ask questions I didn’t yet have language for, and where I could begin to make sense of the world and my place within it. It’s a practice I’ve carried with me ever since.
That longing for belonging eventually pushed me to leave Texas behind and move more times than I can easily count—first to Boulder, Colorado for school, then to Lancaster, England, and eventually to New York City. It was in New York that I felt, for the first time, that unmistakable click of recognition: I belong here. It’s also where the main character of Now Is Not a Good Time for a Breakdown—who had been drifting in and out of my imagination for years—finally came into focus. I realized that this was the city she was formed in, too.
Love eventually carried me across the ocean once more, this time to Zürich, Switzerland. And while I’m deeply grateful for the life I’ve built here, New York will always be my great love. It’s the city that shaped me as both a person and a writer—the city that gave me the courage to want more, to risk more, and to write more honestly. Inspired by authors like Joan Didion, Patti Smith, and Elizabeth Gilbert, I learned there that you can be whoever you want to be, so long as you mind your own business.
This novel is my love letter to that season of becoming—and to the messy, imperfect, and deeply human journey of trying to figure out who you are before the world tells you who to be.
