Abby Jimenez

Abigail Jimenez (; born 1979 or 1980) is an American romance novelist and baker. She is author of three series of romance novels: The Friend Zone (2019–2021), Part of Your World (2022–2024), and Say You'll Remember Me (2025–). She is the owner of a bake shop, Nadia Cakes, with locations in California and Minnesota, and she won the 2013 iteration of the Food Network competition show Cupcake Wars.

Early life Jimenez was born Abigail Hales in Washington, D.C. to a Sicilian mother and a father of Italian descent, and was the oldest of three daughters. She lived in Virginia until the age of seven, and then in California. At the age of twelve, her mother left, leaving her father as a single parent. Jimenez worked a number of retail and restaurant jobs to raise money for college and took her final year of high school as an independent study while working full time at Del Taco. and said she "deeply disliked" high school, with the exception of her creative writing class, and that she was close to being expelled due to her involvement in fights.

Baking career Jimenez was a retail manager in 2007 when she lost her job and founded Nadia Cakes out of her home kitchen in the same year. In 2009, she opened her first brick and mortar location of Nadia Cakes in Palmdale, California. Jimenez won Food Network's Cupcake Wars in 2013 and appeared on TLC's Fabulous Cakes. In 2018, a pink rock candy cake sold by the bakery went viral on social media, owing to its resemblance to a vagina.

Romance writing During a camping trip to Boundary Waters, Jimenez told her children a story that she later developed into a young adult novel. The audiobook for the novel, narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Erin Mallon, was nominated for that year's Audie Award for Romance.

Her third and fourth novels Life's Too Short (2021) and Part of Your World (2022) both went on to become USA Today and New York Times Best Sellers. Her novels have been optioned by Thruline Entertainment, which has begun work on a film adaptation of The Happy Ever After Playlist. Yours Truly was chosen as Book of the Year for 2023 by members of the Book of the Month club. Her 2024 novel Just for the Summer reached number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. It was also chosen for Good Morning America's book club for April 2024.

Jimenez published Say You'll Remember Me on April 1, 2025. The novel reached number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list in the categories of "Combined Print and E-Book Fiction" and of "Hardcover Fiction".

According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Jimenez's novels incorporate "very real and relatable" life experiences like anxiety, grief, and fertility alongside common tropes in romance comedies, and their settings in Minnesota have led her to become a "one-woman booster for state tourism".