Her father, Surain Singh Sidhu, a Sikh immigrant from Amritsar, India, taught physics at the University of Pittsburgh and later worked at the Argonne National Laboratory.

[2] Her mother Mary, a Hungarian-American, was a homemaker whose hobbies included writing song lyrics and raising orchids.

[4] A second novel, Sybille, concerns the death of literature during the Albigensian Crusade and a 13th-century troubadour grappling with her verse as her homeland collapses.

In 1988, Meade published the biography Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, which remains an authoritative source of the author's life and work.

[6] Meade further explored Parker in her 2004 book Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties.

[7] The work covered three other notable female writers of the Jazz Age—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber.

Both the San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post named it among the best books of the year.,[8][9] Kirkus Reviews called it "largely apocryphal and hardly scholarly, but a lot of fun.

Her 2000 biography The Unruly Life of Woody Allen was, The New York Times said, "not a vile book" and "not irresponsible" but did adhere to the standard "consensus of opinion on its subject, depicting him as self-involved, misogynist, egotistical, inconsiderate, isolated and stagnant.