Quimby answered to Corey for the first fourteen years of her life. She was the third sister of three, and grew up in the suburbs of Seattle to wacky liberal parents. Her mother Nancie was Canadian, her father a refugee from the American south with familial roots stretching back for generations of Georgia. Her childhood was eccentric more than quiet; her mother taught French at local high schools, her father worked odd jobs after he lost his job at Boeing — and odd jobs were odd, because he never really found his niche. They moved a few times, although only within the same general area, and when she was 14, she ended up starting over at the beginning of high school with a new name (Ceejay), but not much of a new identity.
An unashamed theater nerd plagued by the curse of the kooky, trouble in her parents' marriage left Ceejay desirous of long, long hours in her high school theater department. She would work on sets, on little skits to put together with her friends, on rehearsals and lighting design and everything else she could think of. She was friendly to everyone despite all the little social setbacks of a high school set, and her talents showed in the music room and on the stage. She signed her yearbooks to her closest friends Corinne Comedienne, and flounced off to college at UCLA at sweet 17.
In college, Quimby met a new world. Her parents and sisters left behind in the north, she discovered that she hated tanning salons, didn't go to the beach, and felt tremendously awkward at parties designed as booze smorgasbords. She started with a major in theater, but found herself surrounded by the dramatic at all times and felt herself overwhelmed by the melodrama. After a long and involved conversation with her father over the phone, long distance from a payphone in front of a dim sum restaurant three miles from her dormintory (long story), Quimby switched her majors to journalism and threw herself into the idea of facts over fiction, or at least, fictionalized facts. She had a talent for drawing attention, a jocularity that endeared her to those who didn't find it tremendously obnoxious, and when she graduated with her BA, she tumbled into a job with a newspaper in a middling-small town in the middle of California (one of the innumerable Sans — let's never mind which one).
Her career was sort of sad, her social life also sort of sad. She threw herself into a long sequence of hobbies — cooking, crochet, horseback riding, judo, tae kwan doh, painting — and found herself largely nontalented at any of them and, more importantly, completely incapable of attracting a long-term relationship throughout this regimented course of hobby-hunting. Without either a man or a career, she eventually threw it all into the back seat of her bright-blue painted 1989 Toyota Tercel, and hit the road. 'Ceejay Quimby Does America,' right? Right. She drove across America, writing little notes to herself and eventually deciding to write a hilarious quippy book about her journey of self-discovery, which at worst she could self-publish when she was done.
Halfway through the book, all the way across the country, Ceejay was driving through New Hampshire on her way back down to New York when NPR informed her the city had just exploded.
The idea of going to the wreck of the city didn't occur until much later, with her book almost entirely finished, working for a news network in Boston and hosting a small internet radio show with a crooked, twisty way of looking at life through a humorous prism. But once she got the idea, it caught in her head and wouldn't go away. She pitched the idea to her publisher through her agent, a terrifying dragon of a woman, around the same time she sold her manuscript. She never expected the road-trip book to do great, and but on the strength of the promise of her new idea, a new journey of discovery into the remains of a ruined metropolis — it sold. It didn't sell great, but it sold. And Quimby, bright with purpose and a little manic with her own self-proclaimed brilliance, headed north for a personal conquest at the island of Manhattan.
![Corrine Quimby](https://string-theory.wdfiles.com/local--resized-images/char:quimby/width="230px"/medium.jpg)