AMERICAN author Nell Freudenberger is someone you'd consider adventurous.

The 32-year-old writer has travelled extensively in Asia. After graduating from Harvard University in 1997, she lived in Bangkok for a year where she taught English to teenagers in a government school.

Though she returned to the United States after her teaching stint to pursue a master of fine arts at New York University, she frequently spent her summers in India.

Her travels are reflected in her first book, Lucky Girls (2003), a collection of short stories about young American women finding their place in the world while living abroad.

The following year, she headed to China, visiting the mainland two times in as many years and researching Beijing's East Village underground art scene.

She also started taking private Chinese-language lessons, and her first novel, The Dissident (2006), is about a Chinese artist who comes to terms with his past while in residence at a Los Angeles high school.

Right now she is working on another novel, and says that part of it might be set in Bangladesh, which she also visited recently.

But there is one place she fears to tread: online literary journals, especially when she herself is the topic.

'I don't read reviews on blogs, unless the publisher sends them to me,' she says in a gentle, girlish voice over the phone from her home in New York, where she lives with her husband, an architect.

'If you read all the gossip on literary blogs, it can be painful.'

If she sounds excessively thin-skinned, she has good reason. The first thing that comes up on a Google search of her name is a 2003 Salon.com article by author Curtis Sittenfeld of Prep (2005) fame, which notes that 'hating Nell Freudenberger... is a virtual cottage industry among ambitious literati'.

The elder of two daughters of a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, she made her literary debut in 2001, at the tender age of 26, in no less a prestigious publication than The New Yorker.

It was the magazine's Summer Fiction issue featuring debut writers, and her story, Lucky Girls, was about a young American painter in Mumbai mourning the death of her older Indian lover, while dealing with his hostile family.

At the time, the writer was an editorial assistant with the magazine, sparking murmurs of cronyism among envious peers.

But what really got her fellow would-be authors up in arms was the photograph that accompanied her story. An attractive brunette, she was depicted kneeling on a bed, staring up at the camera.

As Sittenfeld wrote, not unsympathetically: 'Let's say... that four factors could lead to one young writer's becoming the object of other young writers' loathing.... the writer in question is thought to be attractive, thought not to have paid her dues, known to have gone to Harvard (horrors!), and believed to be without talent.'

Freudenberger still sounds a little hurt when you ask her how she coped with the unkind remarks.

'It was pretty uncomfortable. I feel a little better about it now, but at first it was really hard,' she says.

'They made me feel like a fake. People were saying, 'She has only published one story, she can't write a whole book'. I felt pretty insecure.'

But she has since gone on to prove that she is more than just a lucky girl with a pretty face.

Though her books are not as talked-about as the novels of her fellow Summer Reads alumni, wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer, they garnered positive reviews and earned her a spot in literary journal Granta's second-ever Best of Young American Novelists issue, which came out in April.

The only previous edition, in 1996, featured writers who have since become established names, like Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Franzen.

Ironically enough, Freudenberger is the first to admit that luck played a role in her submitting the story that started it all.

'Bill said to a bunch of assistants: 'We're looking for stories, and some of you must be writers,'' she says, referring to then fiction editor Bill Buford.

At the time, she was spending about an hour each morning before work writing, but had only completed one story she felt was presentable.

'As an American - an outsider - I felt uncomfortable that I had written a story set in Asia. But it was the only story I had, so I turned it in,' she says.

ysteph@sph.com.sg

Lucky Girls ($25.73 with GST) is available from Books Kinokuniya and The Dissident ($33.94 without GST) is available from zakoola.com

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