Wallace is best known for collaborating with Virginia Roberts Giuffre on her bestselling memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (Knopf, 2025). That book has been a worldwide sensation, and garnered four awards (including the top prize, Book of the Year) at the 2026 British Book Awards.

Because Giuffre tragically died by suicide six months before her book was published in 2025, Wallace did many media appearances in her stead and had the privilege of connecting with thousands of her readers. In fact, those readers were the ones who first suggested that Wallace’s next project should be an investigation of Maxwell, the well-heeled, Oxford-educated woman at the center of a global criminal conspiracy that catered mostly to men. (To date, Maxwell – who is serving 20 years – is the only American to be held accountable for those crimes.) Again and again, readers told Wallace they were struggling to understand how Maxwell, or any woman, could do the things she’d been convicted of. From that prompt, a book idea was born.

Previously, Wallace also collaborated on two other books: In 2021, Simon & Schuster published Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company, by Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Random House, 2014), with Ed Catmull, then the president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation, was a New York Times bestseller.

After interning for Newsweek during two college summers, Wallace began her professional career as an assistant to New York Times columnist James Reston. She then spent two years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution covering prisons and death row. Next, she headed to the Los Angeles Times, where she spent 11 years as a reporter covering state politics, higher education, and the entertainment industry. During that period, she shared in two staff-wide Pulitzer Prizes: in 1992, for coverage of the Los Angeles riots, and in 1994, for coverage of the Northridge earthquake. Later, she became the Times’ deputy business editor over entertainment and technology coverage.

Since then, Wallace has been a correspondent at GQ, an editor-at-large at Los Angeles magazine, and a monthly columnist on creativity and innovation (“Prototype”) for the New York Times Sunday Business section. She also served as a senior writer at Conde Nast Portfolio.

Wallace’s magazine work has appeared in GQ, Wired, The New Yorker, New York, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Details, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, Elle, and other national publications. Two of her profiles – “Hollywood’s Information Man” (Los Angeles, 2001) and “Walking Time Bomb” (New York, 2019) – have been nominated for a National Magazine Award.