[4] Born and raised in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, Hildebrand spent her summers on Cape Cod, "playing touch football at low tide, collecting sea glass, digging pools for hermit crabs, swimming out to the wooden raft off shore", until her father died in a plane crash when she was 16.
[6][7] Hilderbrand moved to Nantucket in 1993, working as a "classified ads girl" at a local paper, and later taking up writing.
Her 2018 book The Perfect Couple, which was her first murder mystery,[citation needed] was adapted by Netflix and released as a miniseries with the same name in 2024, starring Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Eve Hewson and Dakota Fanning.
Ellen Pompeo has been working with ABC to adapt Hilderbrand's Paradise Trilogy into a TV series in which she would star after her departure as the lead actress in Grey's Anatomy.
[9] In 1995 Hilderbrand married Chip Cunningham at The Chanticleer in the Nantucket village of Siasconset.