Cree LeFavour

Cree LeFavour (born 1965) is an American writer and former academic.

She is the author of seven books and the co-author of two more.

Her books include the novel Private Means, the memoir Lights On, Rats Out, and the James Beard Award finalist Fish.

LeFavour was born in Aspen, Colorado, where her father, the chef Bruce LeFavour, owned the Paragon Restaurant.

In 1974 LeFavour and her family moved to Robinson Bar Ranch, a dude ranch in central Idaho that the family later sold to Carole King.

LeFavour and her sister Nicole attended Stanley Elementary School before moving to Sun Valley where they attended and graduated from the Community School.

Cree went on to graduate from Middlebury College in Vermont with B.A. in American History.

LeFavour completed her Ph.D. in American Studies at New York University in 2004.

LeFavour has two children with her husband, the book critic, Dwight Garner.

She lives in New York City.

In "An Odyssey of Self-Harm and Out the Other Side," Daphne Merkin's New York Times review of Lights On, Rats Out, she praised LeFavour's "rare willingness to take the reader into difficult and sometimes unpleasant territory."

She called the book "courageous and unsettling" and "a riveting account of a ‘particular kind of crazy’." The book was included in Book Riot's "50 Must-Read Memoirs of Mental Illness"

Library Journal called LeFavour's novel Private Means a "wry, sophisticated, and intelligent rendering of modern, privileged city life," while Chloe Schama in Vogue called it "a tart comedy of manners. Lionel Shriver, writing for the New York Times, was less impressed, asking in her tepid review, "One Cheats the Other Wants To," "Is it not sufficient to pass a reader’s time agreeably enough, and to tell a proficiently executed story with an age-old theme and an updated setting?

I don’t know.

You tell me."