I was born at South Miami Hospital in Miami, Florida in December of 1971. My father, Jon Louis Varese, was a pilot and my mother, Lorraine Rossini Varese, was a beauty-queen-turned-housewife. My sister Colette was born when I was five and my other sister Gina was born when I was seven. Two months after Gina arrived, my father crashed his plane and died.
My grandmother, Rita Rossini, moved in with us temporarily after the plane crash, and was an enormous influence in my life. I went to Nativity Catholic School in Hollywood, Florida during my elementary years, and received all of the appropriate sacraments, right up through Confirmation at the hands of Archbishop Agustín A. Román. I graduated from Chaminade-Madonna College Preparatory in 1990, and then moved to Pennsylvania, where I attended Swarthmore College until 1994.
After Swarthmore, I worked in the computing division at the University of Pennsylvania, took graduate courses in the English and History departments, and eventually decided to go back to school. I applied to the University of California at Santa Cruz because of The Dickens Project (a multi-campus research consortium), and moved there in 1997 to begin my Ph.D. in Literature. After finishing three years of full-time course work and passing my qualifying exams, I advanced to Ph.D. candidacy, but immediately took an academic leave of absence because I was broke and needed to find a job that actually paid.
By some miracle, and with hardly any significant practical experience under my belt, I was hired by Macromedia, Inc. in November of 2000 to write end-user documentation for their web development tools. My plan was to remain working in the industry long enough to pay off my student loans, save some money so that I wouldn't have to take out more loans, and return to school to finish my degree. But the proverbial "golden handcuffs," not to mention my inability to resist San Francisco's finer restaurants, got in the way, and I currently still work full-time as a technical writer, though now it's for Adobe Systems, Inc.
I never let go of my dream to study the Victorians, however, and in 2005 I returned to my dissertation, which is on the development of the British novel and the construction of authorship in the 19th century. So in the morning you can catch me writing about Dickens, Thackeray, or George Eliot, and in the afternoon (and sometimes evening) you'll find me writing technical documentation for web developers. People ask me how I manage to do both, and the answer is, I still don't know.