Alison Rand is a city girl: born and raised in Manhattan where she currently lives. She attended the prestigious Dalton School from the time she was 6 through high school. After Dalton, Alison attended Tulane University in New Orleans but left after two years to work as a flight attendant.
A few years later Alison studied with a senior copywriter to build a spec portfolio. She eventually landed a job as a junior copywriter for an advertising agency before she decided to study acting. In this highly competitive field, she was able to secure mostly commercial work–working towards and hoping for her “big break.”
After some years at this, Alison made a bold move to Rome, Italy, where she lived for three years and had many adventures–until a terrible accident forced her to return to NYC. There she resumed her academic studies and earned her Masters in Social Work at Fordham University.
While not working in the field at the moment, she continues to take continuing education classes to maintain her license and to keep up with the profession.
All her life Alison has felt her emotions intensely, which not unsurprisingly led to her interest in an acting career and later to social work. Spending an eclectic professional life exploring and seeking to understand such emotions in herself and others, she learned how to deal with her own fears-of rejection and abandonment, love and loss, and the yearning for connection that so many people (particularly women) feel and yet cannot identify and express for themselves. She wanted to write her memoir in the hopes of helping those who feel unable to take a chance in life–who feel they are stuck and afraid–to show them how she was able to get past these fears, enrich their lives, and forge ahead.
Alison is an exercise enthusiast, especially hiking and skiing. She is fortunate to have traveled throughout much of Europe, but her passion for hiking, especially in the Dolomite mountains of Italy accompanied by like-minded men and women, supersedes all.
An avid dog person, Alison’s other passion has been her beloved four-legged companions. She plans for her four-year old poodle, Dea to soon begin training as a therapy animal. Alison hopes to bring Dea to hospitals and nursing homes to offer canine comfort to those who are lonely, sad or in pain.
A Place called Grace is available on Amazon.
Struggling New York actress Alison has an outwardly good life: toned body, plenty of dates, a comfortable daily regimen. Still, she feels stagnant, empty, and as blocked as the river view from her Upper West Side apartment. Now divorced and in her mid-30s, she has never gotten past an early childhood trauma of being torn away from her brother and sister when her parents separated. Since then, nothing sticks. No one stays. She craves a sense of permanence, a place to call home.
To shake things up, Alison makes a bold, possibly foolhardy move – she relocates to bureaucracy-riddled Rome, where she barely speaks the language, knows no one except the elusive Casanova who gave her one vacation night of pleasure, and has no acting work waiting.
In a series of tragi-comic encounters, she tries to settle in to an exotic culture, looks for amore in all the wrong places, and begins to break into the acting world.
After a serious accident, Alison’s hopes for an Italian fantasy life come crashing down. Back in New York, the personal tragedies and career obstacles pile up until salvation arrives from an unexpected source.
A Place Called Grace is a humorous, hopeful, bittersweet contemporary memoir. It is a story of finding yourself amid the isolation and loneliness one can feel in modern-day life and shows how a seemingly unmoored existence can find its safe, solid center after all.
Alison will soon be releasing her new memoir, Walking Alison, which is the story of her life with her fur baby told from the dog’s point of view.
