InsaneJournal

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David Townsend was born on April 17th, 1955, to Matthew and Laura Townsend in a small town in rural Pennsylvania. To say that David tended toward strangeness as a child would be an understatement. Quite precocious, he learned at a young age that 'weird' was a term that no one wanted to be called, and cultivated the idea that he was "eccentric," not strange.

He also began writing at a young age, penning his first "novel" at the age of ten, though to this day, no one but him has read it. (His mother had read it, but he didn't know that.) As a teenager, David spent a large amount of his time making life as difficult as humanly possible for his parents -- something he was later repaid for by his own children. He started attending Columbia University in 1974 after a year off from school to work, his parents believing that to attend college, he needed to suppliment his own education.

While in college, he had the luck to meet fashion designer Kristi Kai, living temporarily in New York while she worked on a line. The pair later married in 1977, only three years after David published his first novel, Carrie, after years of publishing short stories in magazines, and his career had begun to explode.

He and Kristi had their first child in 1979, a son that they named Cailen. At that time, David had become a household name, while Kristi had begun to fade into obscurity while she cared for Cailen. To say that David enjoyed being a parent would be an understatement, and it was a miracle that poor Cailen wasn't spoiled by the time he was two. Kristi, however, wasn't that interested in having children, and felt that by having one, she had fulfilled her obligation as wife.

That was the first real problem for the couple, David's desire to be parent, and Kristi's desire not to. He could write a novel and be a father all at once, he told her, and she should be able to do the same. It wasn't until 1982 that they learned they would, again, be expecting a child, and their youngest son, Westley, was born in January of 1983.

That was when the trouble between husband and wife really began, and for years, David would beg Kristi not to leave him, to stay with him until the boys were grown. Eventually, they managed to work things out, simply living together in the house that was eventually left to Kristi when the couple divorced in 2001.

In the meantime, despite marital issues and having first one, then two bratty, sullen teenagers (his mother's revenge, he eventually realized), David's career never dropped off the way some seemed to. He put out novel after novel, perhaps not always to critical acclaim, but nearly always to popular approval. If it wasn't novels, then it was movies, or short stories or magazine articles. He just liked writing.

After the divorced, David moved from the couple's Staten Island home to the sprawling home he'd had built on the land he'd purchased in upstate New York, with four bedrooms, enough space for himself and two grown sons, along with a guest or two. And a massive office with a wall of windows that David currently spends most of his time sitting in front of, writing or listening to complaints lodged by the house's intermittent tenants -- Cailen and Westley. Mostly, he lives there alone with a maid who swings by three days a week to make sure the dust doesn't eat him alive, and a very large Alaskan Malamute named Molly.

His latest novel, Duma Key was released on January 22, 2008, and a collection of short stories is due out in the fall.