I’m a writer based in Los Angeles. I’ve written about arts and culture for the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, New York Times, Elle, Cosmo, and many other publications.
In March 2024, my biography on Luke Perry, A Good Bad Boy, will be published by Simon & Schuster. The book is an inventive hybrid: Between deeply researched chapters on Luke’s life and work, there are vignettes of memoir about time, fandom, grief and growing up in the ’90s. Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, called it “intelligent and moving.” Amy Schumer says it’s “an utterly original love letter.”
My debut novel, Neon Green, published by Unnamed Press, was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and was praised as “witty and entertaining” by the Los Angeles Times. My favorite review in Electric Lit, by Luke Geddes, said: “Under Wappler’s scrutinizing authorial eye, 1994 is a specific and very real moment in time, not a nexus for a litany of obvious cultural touchstones. With evocative detail and restraint her novel depicts life in the nineties as it was actually lived — that is, with the slight addition of spaceships from Jupiter.”
As a ghostwriter and a bylined journalist, I’ve interviewed all kinds of notable figures and icons, including Serena Williams, Kristen Stewart, Kim Kardashian, Amy Adams, Natalie Portman, and Jameela Jamil. I was also a regular panelist on Pop Rocket, a weekly pop culture podcast that ran from 2015-2019.
Previously I was on staff at the Los Angeles Times, covering music, books, film and TV. My essays have appeared in the anthologies Slouching Towards Los Angeles: Living and Writing by Joan Didion’s Light, Mothers Before, Here She Comes Now and Yes Is the Answer.