✏️🛠️ The Book About Luke Perry You Didn’t Know You Needed

We spoke to author Margaret Wappler about how she came to write a nontraditional biography about Luke Perry, why she gravitated toward the Dylan McKay character as a teen and more.

Photo courtesy of Margaret Wappler; collage by Yunuen Bonaparte

Margaret Wappler has worn a lot of different hats as a writer — at different times, she’s been a biographer, journalist and novelist; a critic, essayist and celebrity profiler. She’s written about pop culture for places like the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Elle, The Believer and more, her debut novel, Neon Green, set in the mid-’90s, came out in 2016 and she recently worked on a biography about the co-founder of the Gap. Which is why, after Sean Manning, an editor at Simon & Schuster, had the idea for a book about Luke Perry after he died and Margaret’s name came up, it quickly became clear that her particular combination of experiences made her a natural fit. 

“It wasn’t one of those things where I was sitting there [thinking], ‘I really need to write this Luke Perry book,’” Margaret says, “but once it was on my desk, so to speak, I was like, ‘Wow, I see all these ways to write about and talk about things that are in…