# Daniel M. Lavery

Daniel M. Lavery (born Mallory Ortberg, November 28, 1986) is an American author and editor. He is known for having co-founded the website The Toast, and written the books Texts from Jane Eyre (2014), The Merry Spinster (2018), Something That May Shock and Discredit You (2020), and Women's Hotel (2024). Lavery wrote Slate's "Dear Prudence" advice column from 2016 to 2021. From 2022 to 2023, he hosted a podcast on Slate titled Big Mood, Little Mood. In 2017, Lavery started a paid e-mail newsletter titled Shatner Chatner, renamed to The Chatner in 2021.

## Early life

Born Mallory Ortberg, Lavery grew up in northern Illinois and then San Francisco, one of three children of the evangelical Christian author and former Menlo Church pastor John Ortberg and Nancy Ortberg, who is also a pastor and the CEO of Transforming the Bay with Christ. Lavery attended Azusa Pacific University, a private, evangelical Christian university in California. While a student, Lavery appeared on Jeopardy! and finished last.

## Writing
### Influences

Lavery has credited the work of Shirley Jackson and her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in particular, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress as influential.

### Career overview

Lavery wrote for Gawker and The Hairpin. Through this work, he met Nicole Cliffe, with whom Lavery operated The Toast, a feminist general interest web site, from July 2013 to July 2016.
Lavery was included in the 2015 Forbes "30 under 30" list in the media category. On November 9, 2015, Slate announced that he would take over the magazine's "Dear Prudence" advice column from Emily Yoffe. Lavery stopped writing the column in May 2021.
In 2017, Lavery launched Shatner Chatner, a paid e-mail newsletter. On May 19, 2021, he accepted a Substack Pro deal and shortened the newsletter's name to The Chatner.

### Books
#### Texts from Jane Eyre

Lavery's first book, Texts from Jane Eyre, was released in November 2014 and became a New York Times bestseller. The book was based on a column that he wrote first at The Hairpin, then continued at The Toast, which imagines well-known literary characters exchanging text messages. The premise was inspired by a comments section thread on a piece Cliffe had written for The Awl; on Cliffe's review of Gone With the Wind, a commentator wrote that his or her experience in the South was nearly identical to the novel "except everybody has cell phones". This prompted Lavery to imagine how Scarlett O'Hara might have used a cell phone.

#### Rick and Morty Presents: Krombopulos Michael

Lavery's first comic one-shot, entitled Rick and Morty Presents: Krombopulos Michael, was published by Oni Press on June 20, 2018, following the Rick and Morty character of the same name.

#### The Merry Spinster

A short story collection, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror (Henry Holt, 2018), appeared in 2018. The book, Lavery's second release, was highly anticipated, with Publishers Weekly, Bustle, The A.V. Club and InStyle Australia included in their lists of forthcoming titles in 2018. The Merry Spinster reinvents fairy tales such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast; in the Los Angeles Times, Agatha French described his renderings as making the "stories both weirder and yet somehow more familiar".

#### Something That May Shock and Discredit You

Lavery's third book, a memoir entitled Something That May Shock and Discredit You, was published in February 2020 by Simon & Schuster. It was originally published as individual essays.

#### Women's Hotel

Lavery's fourth book, a novel entitled Women's Hotel, was published in October 2024 by HarperVia.

## Personal life

Lavery identifies as queer. In February 2018, he spoke to Autostraddle about the process of gender transitioning while writing The Merry Spinster. The following month, Lavery was interviewed by Heather Havrilesky in New York magazine's The Cut about coming out as transgender.
In November 2018, Lavery and his girlfriend, Grace Lavery, an associate professor of English at U.C. Berkeley and "the most followed transgender scholar in the world on social media" including Twitter and Instagram, announced their intention to marry. They were married on December 22, 2019.