I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, got my BA in English from UC Santa Barbara, went on to get my grad degree at Boston University and sometime after graduation I reconnected with a guy I knew 8 years earlier from high school, dazzled him with my amazingness (and love of The Guess Who), and ended up marrying him a year later.
I started out as a journalist and now I'm an author. This post basically sums up my life recently. I've been writing ever since I was five when I read a certain book about a certain cat in a certain hat and thought I could write a story just as well. There's really nothing else I could envision myself doing, other than selling flowers off a cart somewhere in Northern Italy, but I'm scared of bugs so that would never work.
Even if I made no money writing (oh wait, I don't), I'd still write because it's my only catharsis. In the unfortunate instances where I can't write for days because of long visits from guests or ill-planned moves in blizzards I start to get cranky and irritable like I haven't had coffee in days and my husband starts making sound effects for the rain and lightening bolts that shoot down from the little gray cloud he says begins to follow me.
This makes me even crankier.
Then I sit down at my computer and write and there is peace in the world slash daisy chains slash hairy-chested men that look like Jesus sitting around campfires with their guitars singing Kumbaya on acid trips. Basically everything is better again.
I just finished my first book, nearly completed my second and have tried my hand at a few short stories. Many are surprised to hear that I don't write light-hearted, humorous fiction. I'm just as surprised, since (I won't lie) my blog is hysterical. But usually the fiction that comes from these fingertips are harrowing stories of love, betrayal, envy, isolation and generally bleak times. I have no idea why I naturally gravitate toward reading and writing this type of
Characters I'm most attracted to are generally tragic, damaged, once-great figures who now lead normal lives they are incapable of dealing with on a daily basis. (Think Norma Desmond, Mrs. Robinson, Lester Burnham, etc.)
Other answers you're dying to know:
- My favorite movie is The Graduate. In my entire existence (all 27 years of it), I have yet to find a film that can possibly touch the brilliance of this one.
- My favorite writer is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Runners up are Ray Bradbury, Richard Yates, Christopher Hitchens, David Sedaris, Jhumpa Lahiri and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
- I hate cutting and preparing raw chicken; for some reason it reminds me of human flesh. If I get stuck cooking with it I gag after it's served and cannot eat it.
- In my former life I lived on a bus and was a Band-Aid -- to either David Bowie, The Eagles, or The Doors. (Okay, maybe not the The Doors; Jim Morrison was a little crazy. Then again we're also lumping Ziggy Stardust into this category. Scratch that.)
- A certain piece of me will always love classic films, foreign films, poodles, Mad Men, vintage typewriters, first-editions of books, and obscure singer/songwriters from the '70s.
- It's been suggested that Stephen Hawking stole his Brief History of Time...from my fourth-grade paper.
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