Price grew up in Weston, Massachusetts. She studied English at Stanford University. She originally had no intentions of becoming a cartoonist, but after a few years she began submitting strips to The New Yorker but they were never picked up. She was then hired as a freelance copywriter for an ad agency in San Francisco. Whilst there she submitted her comics to the San Francisco Chronicle and they were published in the opinion and book review section. Her success at the Chronicle inspired her to begin submitting her work for syndication. In 1995, Price received a call from King Features Syndicate to request more samples of her work and by June of that year she was syndicated. Price was just 25 years old at the time which makes her the youngest cartoonist to achieve national syndication.