Jennifer is the author of two books, a collection of short stories, Better Get Your Angel On and a memoir, Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach’s Daughter, describing her childhood as a coach’s daughter and also documenting the closeness her family had with the members of the Los Angeles Rams and the Washington Redskinsthat her father coached.
Pat Conroy called Fifth Quarter “the best book about football I’ve ever read–and Jennifer Allen never played a down in her life.”In The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviewed the book, noting that in writing about her father. She “illuminates his innermost soul and gives us not just a football coach but a human being.”
The memoir contains claims that George held her by her feet over Niagara Falls, struck her boyfriend in the head with a pool cue. Threw his brother Bruce through a glass sliding door, tackled his brother, Gregory. Breaking his collarbone, and dragged Jennifer upstairs by her hair. In the book, she wrote, “George hoped someday to become a dentist he said he saw dentistry as a perfect profession getting paid to make people suffer.”
In May 2006, Jennifer qualified some of the claims made in the book. With regards to the pool cue incident, she claimed it was a joke and that “Allen was simply testing her boyfriend’s reflexes.” With regards to the dentist quote, Jennifer claims that the book was a “novelization of the past” and written from the perspective of a young girl “surrounded by older brothers and a larger-than-life father.” She claims to have a great relationship with her brother and noted that George walked her down the aisle at her wedding.
