My Life with the Walter Boys

Author Ali Novak is a Wisconsin native and graduate of the University of Wisconsin’s creative writing program. Novak wrote the first version of what would become My Life With the Walter Boys on the online reading and writing community platform Wattpad when she was only 15. The story gained significant attention, receiving over 24 million reads online, and was then published in 2014.

An avid reader, Novak credits her love of reading with inspiring her to become a writer. “I started writing because I wanted to recreate the emotions I felt while reading for others and build a world for readers to escape to just like my favorite authors had done for me” (“Ali Novak.” Wild Mind for Authors). Given that Novak began writing her novel at age 15, the characters’ experiences and emotions mirror those that nearly all teenagers experience, creating a novel that resonates with many young adult readers.

Following in the footsteps of other popular YA fiction like Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, My Life With the Walter Boys was adapted into a Netflix series in 2023. In an interview with writer and content creator Haley Grace McCormick, Novak shares that the experience of getting to visit the set of the television show was emotional one: “I am speechless right now trying to describe the experience because it is not something that is easy for me to explain.