[3] Hayden's story collection was selected by bestselling author Cheryl Strayed for republication with Pharos Editions out of Seattle and was published in May 2014.
She was the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978) and her husband, Charles L. Hayden, a telephone company worker and jazz pianist, who died in 1972.
[1][4] Hayden was educated at Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private girls' school in Greenwich, Connecticut, and at Radcliffe College, from which she graduated cum laude in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in English.
Shortly after the publication of her collection in 1976, a breast cancer diagnosis and rapid decline into ill health and advancing alcoholism may have prevented significant further writing.
The New Yorker issue dated the day of her death—September 14, 1981—contained her last piece, a profile on the gardens at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, where her memorial was held.