About

ABOUT ME

I have middle child syndrome, I'm a middle-aged mom, a middle school English teacher and I'm pretty fed up. I've had more than one mid-life crisis--the most impactful in my mid-thirties when I went off to Japan and taught English for two and a half years. There, I fell in love with katatsus, TOTO washlet toilets, saw the true meaning of sa-bis (service) and ate fresh, nutritious food that grew my 4C hair to lengths unachievable in the states.

I have a deep affinity for Chinese culture and I've never felt more alive than when I walked along a section of The Great Wall near Beijing.

My short story/memoir "Meet Me, Meet My Uterus" is featured in the anthology WOMEN REINVENTED: True Stories of Empowerment and Change (LaChance Publishing, 2010). It details how, after years of believing I had no maternal yearnings, the discovery of a fibroid made me realize how badly I wanted to become a mother.

Speaking of motherhood, it tethered me to the earth, marking the first time I ever truly felt part of the human species and not like my real family had left me behind after I'd fallen out of the spacecraft.

My current project, a two-part novel series entitled WOMEN WHO WANT TOO MUCH is about four middle-aged, midwestern moms who form a coven. I admit that while I wanted WOMEN WHO WANT TOO MUCH to be high-brow (critiquing our all-too human obsession with comparison), I also needed this story to have the guilty fun of a telenovela.

Oh, and I was born in Brooklyn. Nuff said.

This is me and my (then) four-month old on the cover (How I would wind up in peri-menopause a mere two years later is beyond me).

There are so many reasons why I love this book. One, it's about four women from very different origins who come together (this shouldn't be as rare as it is!). Two, the women are unapologetic about their desire to answer the question "Is this all there is?" while still trying to do the right thing by everyone around them.