Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended Brown University, where she studied writing and painting; in 1983 she graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts with an M.F.A. in creative writing. Her first book, Monkeys, won the 1987 Prix Femina. She has also received an O. Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize for her writing.

Sexuality and the difficulties of romantic relationships are a constant theme in Minot's work. Her second book, Lust and Other Stories, focuses on "the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart". Reviewing her novella Rapture in The Atlantic Monthly, James Marcus notes that "Sex and the single girl have seldom been absent from Susan Minot's fiction", and Dave Welch at Powells.com identifies one of Minot's themes as "the emotional safeguards within family and romantic relations that hold people apart". About Lust, Jill Franks observes that Minot

begins with short, simple sentences, building gradually to longer ones to create the inevitable conclusion: men don't love like women do. Her logic appears in simple two-or three-liners that capture a sense of futility.... Do not look for a happy, mutual, heterosexual relationship in Minot. You will not find it.

Minot has also co-authored two screenplays that have been made into films: Stealing Beauty (1996) with Bernardo Bertolucci, and Evening (based on her novel of the same name, 2007), written with Michael Cunningham.

Novels and Stories

Screenplays

Poetry