Pessl was born in Clarkston, Michigan, to Klaus, an Austrian engineer for General Motors, and Anne, an American homemaker. Pessl's parents divorced when she was three, and she moved to Asheville, North Carolina with her mother and sister. Pessl had an intellectually stimulating upbringing, recalling that her mother read "a fair chunk of the Western canon out loud" to her and her sister before bed, and entered her in lessons for riding, painting, jazz, and French.[1] She was also a fan of The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, and the Nancy Drew books.[2]
After graduating, she worked as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, while writing in her free time. After two failed attempts at novels,[4][5] Pessl began writing a third novel in 2001 about the relationship between a daughter and her controlling, charismatic father.[1] Pessl completed the novel, titled Special Topics in Calamity Physics, in 2004 and it was published in 2006 by Viking Penguin to "almost universally positive" reviews, translated into thirty languages, and eventually becoming a New York Times Best Seller.[1]Kirkus Reviews called it "sharp, snappy fun for the literary-minded." Peter Dempsey writing for the Guardian, despite giving it a mixed review overall, called it "a page-turning murder mystery with a gratifyingly complex plot, a dizzying Usual Suspects-style narrative with nods to detective novelists conventional (Agatha Christie) and unconventional (Carlo Emilio Gadda). On a second reading, what appeared to be a high-school tale spatchcocked on to the story of an amateur detective is seen to be a ground-laying exercise of immense skill."[6]
Pessl's third novel, Neverworld Wake, was released on June 5, 2018. It is described as a "psychological suspense novel with a sci-fi twist."[9] It is set in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.[2] Pessl said in an interview, "I was working on my next adult novel, and I had this little germ of an idea about these five teenagers who used to be friends coming together in a sort of Agatha Christie-style, claustrophobic mansion type setting where they’re stuck. And at the time, I was very much interested in the brain and the consciousness and what’s real and what isn’t, so I definitely started going down this rabbit hole of trapping them and having them stuck in a way that went beyond anything Agatha Christie ever came up with."[2]
Writing style
Writing for Vulture, Nitsuh Abebe said, "Any reader of Pessl’s novels will notice she’s a lover of puzzles and secrets, hidden connections and buried clues."[10]
Pessl married neurosurgeon Dr. David Gordon on February 28, 2015.[12] They have three children – Winter Guinevere Gordon, born July 10, 2015,[13]
Avalon Blue Gordon, born January 24, 2017,[14] and Raine Juliet Gordon, born October 8, 2019.