[1] Tatiana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad to a physicist professor Nikita Tolstoy [ru] and Natalya Mikhailovna Lozinskaya.

[4][5] As recalled by Tolstaya, in November 1982 she underwent an operation on her eyes and had to spend three months in rehabilitation, unable to see in the bright light.

As Michiko Kakutani writes, "one can find echoes...of her great-granduncle Leo Tolstoy's work - his love of nature, his psychological insight, his attention to the details of everyday life".

[9] But "her luminous, haunting stories most insistently recall the work of Chekhov, mapping characters' inner lives and unfulfilled dreams with uncommon sympathy and insight", and also display "the author's Nabokovian love of language and her affinity for strange excursions into the surreal, reminiscent of Bulgakov and Gogol.

She began teaching Russian literature and creative writing first at Princeton, then at Skidmore College, and gave lectures in multiple universities.

[12][8] She also emerged as a journalist and contributed to the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, TLS, the Wilson Quarterly, and also wrote for Russia-based editions such as the Moscow News, the Capital and Russian Telegraph.

[5] In the early 1990s Tolstaya worked in speechwriting for the Union of Right Forces party along with screenwriter and journalist Dunya Smirnova and literary critic Alexander Timopheevsky [ru].

[16] For the twelve years between 2002 and 2014, with her friend Avdotya Smirnova [ru] Tolstaya co-hosted a Russian cultural television programme, The School for Scandal (Школа злословия, named after Richard Sheridan's play), on which she conducted interviews with diverse representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics.

[5] Written in a playful and poetic language, the stories are a mixture of real and fictional recollections of her childhood, her travels and family.