Livingston was born in Rochester, New York. As a child, her single mother moved the family to rural western New York, including time on the Tonawanda Reservation, before returning with her seven children to northeast Rochester.
Livingston's family attended Corpus Christi Church led by Father James Callan where she was one of the first female altar servers and participated in anti-nuclear protests at the Seneca Army Depot, and, later, actions against the first Gulf War. Her experiences of Roman Catholicism and urban and rural poverty in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s largely inform her work, and are the basis for her award-winning memoir Ghostbread.[2]
Her writing is marked by lyricism and a focus on place. She has said:
The job of the writer - especially the nonfiction writer - is to get beyond easy categories and judgments. As someone who grew up in a family and setting that are very easily judged (often harshly and incorrectly) I'm especially sensitive to those things, the wrong they do, and the ways they falsely divide us.[3]
