Filipacchi began writing at age thirteen. She attended Hamilton College and graduated a year early with a BA in Creative Writing.

In 1990, Filipacchi enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA fiction writing program. Immediately upon entering, she started writing her novel, Nude Men, which would be her master’s thesis. She took a class with The New Yorker’s fiction and poetry editor, Alice Quinn.

Impressed with Filipacchi’s novel, Quinn asked her if she had an agent and offered to recommend her to agent Melanie Jackson. In 1992, when Filipacchi was twenty-four years old and before her graduation, Jackson sold Nude Men to Nan Graham at Viking Press. The novel was translated into thirteen languages, and the reviews...both in the U.S. and abroad...were almost unanimously praiseful. It was anthologized in The Best American Humor 1994 (published by Simon & Schuster 1994).

Filipacchi’s second and third novels, Vapor (1999) and Love Creeps (2005), were similarly well reviewed and also translated into multiple languages.

Her novels have received acclaim not only from major publications, but also from many well-known authors, including Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Edmund White, Dale Peck, Alain de Botton, Kathryn Harrison, and the French filmmaker Louis Malle.

Reviewers have called Filipacchi “fearsomely witty,” and “a prodigious postfeminist talent.” She was hailed by The New York Times as a "lovely comic surrealist.” Her work has been compared to John Irving, Nabokov, Muriel Spark, John Fante, Angela Carter, Lewis Carroll, Woody Allen, and Ann Beattie. Love Creeps was one of The Village Voice's top 25 books of the year.

Following the Dutch-language publication of Love Creeps in late 2004, Filipacchi was invited to be the sole North American participant in the 2005 Saint Amour literary festival, a 10-city tour through Belgium (where Nude Men had been a number-one bestseller) that coincides with Valentine's Day.

In November 2007, film rights to Love Creeps were optioned by Scope Invest (Geneviève Lemal at Scope Pictures), the company that produced "The Child" ("L'Enfant"), winner of the 2005 Cannes Palme d'Or Award. Love Creeps will be developed in collaboration with producers Alexandra Milchan and Aimée Peyronnet.

Her novels have been on required reading lists in several schools in the U.S. and abroad. At present, Love Creeps is being studied at Columbia University’s graduate creative writing program in a course on the comic novel.

Filipacchi was born in Paris, France, was educated in France and the U.S., and holds both U.S. and French citizenship. She has been living in New York, United States since the age of 17.