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Amy Dickinson grew up on a small dairy farm in the Finger Lakes district of New York state. Her father wanted his three daughters to be farmers but gave up on them when they refused to compete in the local Diary Princess pageant. Her large family has lived in and around her hometown (pop. 450) continuously since the Revolutionary War. She has described them as "hilarious, short-waisted Methodists."

"My extended family is a collection of married and divorced parents, single mothers, step-relatives, adoptees-and devoted siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles and grandparents. I grew up hearing stories about my ancestor's exploits-my great grandfather was warden of Sing Sing Prison and my great uncle ran off to Europe and joined the circus when he was 40. Life in my hometown was like growing up in Lake Wobegon, only with worse weather and high unemployement," she says.

Dickinson attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She has worked as a receptionist for The New Yorker magazine, as a producer for NBC News in Washington and New York, as a lounge singer, and as a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Esquire, Allure, O magazine and other publications. For the past three years, she has been a frequent contributor to Time magazine, writing a column about family life.

For the past seven years, Dickinson's commentaries and radio stories have been featured on the National Public Radio program "All Things Considered." In the early days of the Internet, she wrote a weekly column, carried on America Online's News Channel, which often drew on her experiences as a single parent and member of a large, extended family. She has been a Sunday school teacher for 10 years and is a substitute teacher at a local nursery school.

Dickinson is thrilled to be named as the Chicago Tribune's new advice columnist. "Because I so often write about personal issues and points of family conflict, readers have been reaching out to me, asking for advice about everything from their children's appalling table manners to their sticky relationships with the in-laws. I realized that people really want to have a conversation, and I'm honored that they want to have it with me."