I have words and music in my genes. Born in Manhattan just as World War II ended, I grew up in an arty family (my father and grandmother were writers; my mother, a pianist), mostly in rural New Jersey. We moved back to New York when I was in seventh grade. So I got a taste of both city and country.
In school I continued to be literary (“I want to be a writer—a good writer,” I once murmured in my sleep during a class trip, to the bemusement of my bunkmates). Although my college major (Washington University, B.A., 1967) was history, my senior thesis was about the relation between British social policies and the reformist novels (from Dickens to Disraeli to Mrs. Gaskell) of the nineteenth century. So I snuck fiction in through a side door.
Ah, yes, fiction: My ambition was and is to write it (I have had stories published in Seventeen and Ploughshares, and I intend to post stories or works-in-progress on this website), because it is what I love to read. I also write book reviews for bookreporter.com. Much of my career, however, has been devoted to editing: first at Liberation, a left-wing political monthly; then at Cosmopolitan, where as Copy Chief I learned the nuts and bolts of magazine production; and finally an 18-year stint at Mademoiselle, now sadly defunct. There I ultimately became Executive Editor.
When my mother died in 1996 it seemed a moment for a break with the past. In 1998 I left Mademoiselle and spent a year in Jerusalem with my husband, David, a professor of philosophy at City College of New York and the author of 11 books (in marrying him, I also acquired three incomparable stepchildren: Michael, Sarah, and Eli). In 2000 I switched gears from editing to writing: For ten years I was a freelance Contributing Editor for O, the Oprah Magazine, writing monthly style features and first-person essays.
I also wrote about the aging body (“It Figures”) for a new book entitled In the Fullness of Time: 32 Women on Life After 50, edited by Emily W. Upham and Linda Gravenson. In this volume, published by Atria and now in its second printing, I am privileged to be in the company of such writers as Erica Jong, Paula Fox, Gail Godwin, Vivian Gornick, Tina Howe, Sharon Olds, Edna O’Brien, and Ntotzake Shange.
I developed all sorts of hobbies—many of them harking back to my childhood—when I was in my thirties: studying ballet, piano and music theory; drawing, painting, and calligraphy (I’ve written about some of these; see Published Work). I have also worked as a hospice volunteer (the subject of an O piece called “The Home of the Brave”), and I am much concerned with the way our culture turns away from and denies death rather than treating it in a humane and thoughtful fashion.
From the sublime to the (sometimes) ridiculous, I am also quite passionate about clothing, textiles, and all things design related (I am a Project Runway groupie…). One of my goals on the site will be to talk about how to be less obsessed with fashion—yet still dress well—as one grows older.
As I turn 66, I have never felt less shy or retiring, or more ready to scroll down to a new chapter. With the internet looming ever larger in our lives—and at the risk of seeming self-promoting or obnoxious by the standards of my generation—I decided to create an online “home” for my own writing. In addition to functioning as a guide to my published work, it will contain new long pieces, fiction and non, and shorter blog entries in which I rant, praise, and obsess.
Welcome to my virtual house of delight. I hope you find it useful, intelligent, and attractive.
