She was born in Paris and educated in both in France and in the U.S. She is the author of four novels, Nude Men (1993), Vapor (1999), Love Creeps (2005), and The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (2015).

[3] In 1990, Filipacchi enrolled in Columbia University's MFA fiction writing program, where she wrote a master's thesis which she later turned into her first published novel, Nude Men.

[1] In 1992, when Filipacchi was 24, a time shortly before her graduation, her agent, Melanie Jackson,[1] sold Nude Men to Nan Graham at Viking Press.

[23][24] In a follow-up piece, Filipacchi stated that editors had targeted her Wikipedia biography page in retaliation for her criticism,[25] which Andrew Leonard covered in more detail in Salon.

Leonard quoted several combative remarks made by the primary proponent of "revenge editing" who was later revealed to be writer Robert Clark Young.