I was just a few weeks pregnant when I was hit with the idea for my newest book, Switchcraft. I was on the phone with my friend in New York, turning just a slight shade of green at the tales of her dating adventures. My life as an unfettered young woman was over and then I wondered what would happen if we switched lives? Continue reading...

I kept hearing about joy, but what I saw was struggle. Doubt. Anguish. I heard praise, but even without looking, I stumbled upon notes of opposition that told -- just maybe -- a different story. The year was 2002 and I was in Puerto Rico on a research trip, watching archival footage of the famous Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. Continue reading...

I suppose my mother's reading to me as a child could be logged as my first introduction to fiction. In-between my childhood delight with fiction and my fiction writing career, two masters and a Ph.D. in history happened. It was after my Ph.D. in 1985 that I returned to fiction. I guess I had exhausted my curiosity about the "truth." Or, more accurately, I had exhausted my curiosity about formal historical study as a path to understanding "reality." Continue reading...

When I began No Place Safe: A Family Memoir, I didn't expect it to be a memoir at all. It was going to be me telling my mother's story of being a cop on a 1980s serial murder investigation. New to nonfiction, I wasn't sure if it should be a biography or a true crime story. Interviewing my mother helped me figure out exactly what story I was going to be telling. I also spent time looking through a box of files, notes and pictures she kept about the case, expecting someone eventually would write about it. She had hoped it would be me, but I resisted for years because I was a novelist, though I hadn't yet sold a novel. Continue reading...

I'm often asked how I came to write Look Me in the Eye. This is the story. As my readers know, I've had an unusual life. It began with a crazy home environment, which I left behind at age sixteen when I joined a local band. Within a few years, I found myself on the road with the biggest tour of the decade -- KISS. Having reached the top of the world in music, I quit to work as an engineer in a toy company. But a few years later, I left that behind, too, when I quit electronics to repair cars in my driveway. And over the next decade I built that business into the largest independent Land Rover, Rolls Royce and Bentley specialty shop in New England. In the midst of that, I discovered photography, with my photos landing in galleries, museums, on record jackets and on billboards. And to top it all off, I began writing articles for car magazines. Continue reading...

I was at home in New York City on the morning of 9/11, when United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the World Trade Center. I was shocked and furious. A couple days later I visited the still-burning hulk with my Newsweek editor. The devastation was appalling. I began to write. The first article was about Israeli counter-terror experts. The next concerned cyber-terror. For another magazine, I wrote about an FBI special agent and SWAT operator working counter-terror at DFW airport and an F-15C pilot who flew her fighter jet in Iraq during the American invasion. Continue reading...

When I began to write Matrimony, I was thirty-three and living in Ann Arbor, where I had gone to graduate school; my first novel, Swimming across the Hudson, had recently been published. I had also just met the woman I would eventually marry, and though our relationship would be long-distance for the first two years and we wouldn't get married for several years after that, I knew from the start that this was the person I would spend my life with. And I sensed, in knowing this, that big changes lay ahead, changes I couldn't yet comprehend. Continue reading...