Rebecca Gilman was born in 1964 in Trussville, Alabama, where she enjoyed a quiet southern upbringing—a childhood that is evidenced in her mild demeanor and soft southern drawl. After experiencing an unremarkable upbringing, Gilman left home at seventeen to attend college on the East Coast. A restless student, she attended four schools on her way to receiving two degrees. She dropped out of Middlebury College—an experience that would later inspire a play—before receiving her B.A. in English from Birmingham-Southern University in Alabama. Subsequently, she dropped out of graduate studies at the University of Virginia before receiving an M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Iowa. She had been writing plays since the age of eighteen—her first play was about a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop—and some of them were produced either nonprofessionally or as student productions at Birmingham-Southern and later the University of Iowa. Many of these early works were children’s plays, with titles such as Hansel and Goosel, and bear little resemblance to the gritty body of work for which she is now known.

After Gilman was graduated from the University of Iowa, she took a hiatus from her writing career. She got married, moved to Iowa City, and began working for a standardized testing agency to earn money. After three years and a divorce, Gilman moved to Chicago and worked as a temporary office worker while reexamining herself as a writer and shopping her work to theaters around the country. During this period, her plays were rejected by many theaters, which considered them to be too rough or daring to stage.

Gilman was thirty-two years old when she had her breakthrough production. Her agent convinced a small theater outside of Chicago, the Circle Theater in Forest Park, Illinois, to produce The Glory of Living, Gilman’s play about a child bride turned serial killer. Though the theater was small, as was the production, it was strong enough to garner positive feedback from Chicago critics as well as attention from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, which immediately offered Gilman a five-thousand-dollar commission for her next work.

Despite the pressure of her sudden popularity, Gilman lived up to expectations by producing Spinning into Butter, based on her experiences at Middlebury College. Gilman, who never felt as if she fit in with the East Coast students, whom she found somewhat pretentious, created the character of Sarah, who echoes these fish-out-of-water sentiments. Spinning into Butter, an exploration of hidden racism among liberal school administrators, was shocking to many audiences because of its no-holds-barred approach to tackling racism and because of its harsh and decidedly nonpolitically correct language. The Goodman Theatre was impressed enough with the positive critical response to this play to offer Gilman a standing commission. Spinning into Butter then went to Broadway, where the playwright’s reputation would become national.

The Goodman Theatre also commissioned Gilman’s next work, Boy Gets Girl. Boy Gets Girl was well received and is considered by some critics to be her strongest work. After the success of Spinning into Butter, Boy Gets Girl easily found a production in New York’s Manhattan Theater Club, as did The Glory of Living. Gilman married literature professor Charles Harmon and moved to Columbus, Ohio. Though she considers herself a writer for the stage, she has begun exploring screenwriting.