Today we’d like to introduce you to Paige Harbison
Paige, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in an artistic family. My father was a musician and visual artist, my mother and both aunts were (are) writers, so it’s not a surprise that I would grow up and stay in the arts. In school, I did plays and musicals, sang in choir, played violin and piano, and had every intention of pursuing acting. And then, at the end of my Freshman year in college on a long train journey, I wrote a book. I had never intended to be an author or follow in my mom’s footsteps. It sold that very next Fall to Harlequin Teen, which was a new imprint at the time. I changed my major from Theatre to Art & Design, thinking in the naïve way that only a nineteen year old can, that I needed to choose between the things I wanted to pursue. Also being a teenager, I didn’t want it to be a very demanding major so I picked something that would feel more like fun, rather than doing Creative Writing and burning myself out.
Over the next couple of years I wrote three books with that publisher, Here Lies Bridget, New Girl, and Anything to Have You. I was so young at the time that I felt like opportunities would continue to roll in forever—my first book was optioned, I was asked to ghostwrite, and at one bewildering point, Robert Zemeckis’ team reached out to me about a potential avenue for screenwriting.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
And then my twenties hit, my father passed away, I ended a long college relationship, and I became completely distracted by the pull to write something meaningful. Any other writer reading this will know the feeling—they want to be the ingenue who writes the next great American novel, or the the next Oscar-winning screenplay and the wanting-it gets in the way of creating it. I bartended nights and was too exhausted to be creative in the day, wasting most of my creative energy on drama with boys and friends.
I started ghostwriting in my late twenties, and that started to shake loose my obsession with being precious about my writing—I was writing things that didn’t feel particularly powerful or life-changing but I was finally paying bills with my passion again.
Then the pandemic came along. A mega tragedy that the entire world now shares as a lived experience. And because of where I was in my life at that time—coming off another breakup, burned out from bartending late, late nights for almost a decade, broke—the respite it provided ended up being the best thing that could have happened to me. For once, my bills were paid, my debt was finally lessening, and I wasn’t faced with the lure of nights out or drama with boyfriends. And my family, the artists, decided to move across the country from Washington D.C. to Palm Springs, California, into a beautiful house on a golf course with a pool, a hot tub, and tons of space for all of us—and our dogs.
In that year, I learned to relax, got back to reading, recorded more music with my brother (a musician, surprise, surprise—band name Thalo), painted in the sweltering nights amidst the palm trees and under the string lights, and started selling pet portraits online. And, as a bonus, a mutual family friend introduced me to the love of my life, a filmmaker who would go on to inspire me more than anyone in the world has.
I moved to LA after quarantine, and even though I had to get back to bartending, I was creatively on fire. I worked on some screenplays, I kept painting, I did more pet portraits, I continued to record with my brother, and I finally wrote a book I believed in. And somehow, all of this got me back to my earliest roots—performing!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
These days I’m known as a writer and a content creator.
It was hard to start doing TikToks and Instagram Reels. All I could imagine was old frenemies hate-watching me, sending the videos to each other and cringing, especially when they got low view counts. But eventually something hit and I stopped feeling embarrassed. I did a ‘Hallmark Movie in One Minute’ series which, over the course of last Fall and Christmas, garnered over eighteen million views across the platforms. Shamelessly capitalizing off of this, I started a podcast with my mother, Nameless Best Friends, where we watch Hallmark and other good-bad movies and gossip about them!
I wish, in a way, I could tell my nineteen-year-old self not to stop acting, not to become so self-conscious about what other people think, and not to get so bogged down in the validation of people I’d go on to try and forget. But now it’s also very easy to see that it makes perfect sense I didn’t have it all figured out in my twenties, and that I had a lot of growing to do before I could ever be expected to become myself or have a valuable story to tell.
Now, the podcast is still going strong, gearing up for this year’s cozy season (we watch all thirty movies in Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas which is a wild ride), I’m still doing videos on Instagram and TikTok, and my next book comes out early summer 2025, and it’s called ‘THE OTHER SIDE OF NOW.’ Preorders aren’t available yet, but I’ll post as soon as they are on my social media (@pharbeaux). I also do music with my brother, look up Thalo wherever you get music!
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I loved being the center of attention–one time my fifth grade teacher actually had to talk to my parents because I wouldn’t stop doing a British accent in class. I loved doing plays, singing, I played violin and piano, liked to paint, played pretend for just a little too long into my adolescence.
There weren’t that many kids in my family, just me until my brother came along when I was ten years old, and my three cousins who lived halfway across the country, so I was used to being the limelight. But I also envied the funny adults and couldn’t wait to grow up. I hated ordering off the ‘Kiddie Menu’ and started working when I was thirteen years old–at Starbucks! I kept doing plays through high school and working, eventually getting into serving/bartending.
Pricing:
- Pet Portraits start at $250 on my website: paigeharbison.com/shop
- The ‘LLLuke’ Sweatshirt based off my hallmark videos is $40 at paigeharbison.com/shop
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.paigeharbison.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pharbeaux
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@pharbeaux
Image Credits
#1: n/a (pet portrait)
#2: Tom’s One Hour Photo
#3: n/a
#4: Paige Harbison
#5: Jack Harbison
#6: Richie Costales
#7: n/a
#8: Richie Costales
