ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I have been writing since I was old enough to string words together. The poetry I comprised as a child was of the garden variety, but it earned high praise from my grandmother, my mother and my aunt Shirley, who was a voracious reader. There was a bookcase in her living room filled with novels she had read from The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck to Dinner at Antoine’s by Frances Parkinson Keyes. I read as many of them as I could when I visited each summer. Then when I was in eighth grade, an English teacher who thought I had promise as a writer gave me a copy of David Copperfield, sparking my lifelong love of Charles Dickens. When I was in high school, my father surprised me with an Underwood manual typewriter that weighed at least 30 pounds, and I began hammering out short stories. My dream was to become a novelist, but we’ve all heard the old adage, “Man plans and God laughs.” There were two failed marriages (the silver lining was my two beautiful daughters) and years of newspaper and magazine work that paid the bills, but there never seemed to be enough time to write that novel I knew I had in me. Then, during the pandemic when businesses were shuttered and we were all in lockdown, I began writing every day, fleshing out my idea for What We Remember, which celebrates the friendships that sustain us when things fall apart. It may have taken me longer than I hoped to become a published author, but to paraphrase George Eliot, it’s never too late to be what you might have been.