Sheila Ballantyne

Ballantyne was born Sheila Caroline Weibert in Seattle, Washington.^[1] Ballantyne's mother died of cancer when Ballantyne was ten years old, and she and her sister were raised by her widowed father in Seattle.^[1][2] After graduating high school, she enrolled at Mills College in San Francisco, studying writing.^[1]

After college, Ballantyne worked in the medical records department of Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco.^[2] There, she met Philip Spielman, a psychoanalyst whom she subsequently married.^[2] The couple had one son, Stefan, and a daughter, Anya.^[1] She published her debut novel, Norma Jean and the Termite Queen, in 1975, using her mother's maiden name of Ballantyne as a pen name.^[1]

In 1982, Ballantyne published the semi-autobiographical Imaginary Crimes, which documents the upbringing of two young girls in 1960s Portland, Oregon.^[1] The novel helped earn Ballantyne a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year,^[2] and was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 1994, starring Harvey Keitel, Fairuza Balk, Kelly Lynch, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Elisabeth Moss.^[1]

Beginning in 1984, she began teaching writing at Mills College, her alma mater, where she worked for 12 years.^[1] In 1988, she published Life on Earth, a collection of short stories which present death as a nameless personified villain.^[1]

Ballantyne died at her home in Berkeley, California, on May 2, 2007, of multisystem atrophy, aged 69.^[1]

• Norma Jean and the Termite Queen (1975)
• Imaginary Crimes (1982)
• Life on Earth (1988)