She attended the University of California, Irvine, where she earned a BA in English with a creative writing emphasis, having been influenced by the fiction of Albert Camus in high school and that of D. H. Lawrence in college.
[3] Her first published book was Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women, a critical essay that examined what Nixon saw as the change in gender power dynamics between D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love, a supposed sequel The Rainbow.
It was very favorably reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, by Richard Locke in The Wall Street Journal, in The Chicago Tribune, and Entertainment Weekly.
In 2000, Nixon's published Angels Go Naked, a collection of interrelated short stories that form a larger narrative.
In 2017 sociologist Clayton Childress published Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), which used Jarrettsville as its focus in tracing a novel from inspiration through publication and then reception by reviewers and readers.