About me
Visiting my favorite place on the planet, the fiction room at Powells Books in Portland, Oregon.
I wrote the first short story of my life for a class assignment in third grade. It was about a talking banana. The experience thrilled me so much, I instantly knew I wanted to spend my life telling stories.
Like many writers, I then spent roughly the next 35 years of my life battling imposter syndrome and perfectionism before finally returning to my first love of fiction writing in earnest. After finishing my dream project, my first novel The Pearl Farmers, during the Covid pandemic, I recommitted to writing and publishing fiction (with a lot of revising in between those two ends of the journey).
My background
I grew up in a small town in the Appalachian foothills of Southern Ohio. While studying magazine journalism at a university in those same foothills, I minored in English and studied fiction writing with novelists Dan Chaon and Jack Matthews and won my university's literary prize in 1994.
I worked as a magazine reporter covering the jewelry industry (work that inspired The Pearl Farmers) before moving to Northern California to join the tip of the tail-end of the dot-com boom. Since then I've worked as a professional writer ("content strategist") in the tech industry, gaining experiences that have inspired my in-progress detective series set in Silicon Valley.
I currently live in Alameda, California (which residents just call "The Island") with my husband, college-aged daughter, and black Lab dog Winston. By day, I lead a product content team at Google. I'm also the author of three non-fiction books on design and ecommerce.
Influences and themes
I devour fiction. Harkening back to my childhood trying to break records in the summer readathon, when the weather gets warm you can find me loading up on books at the local library. Nothing says vacation like a meaty, satisfying novel.
My favorite writers, and thus influences, including Richard Russo, Alice Munro, Ann Patchett, Michael Chabon, Jane Smiley, Ruth Ozeki, William Maxwell, Lorie Moore, Grace Paley, Tana French, Kate Atkinson, Stella Gibbons, Julia Glass, Margaret Drabble, and Edith Wharton. I adore English mysteries (from classics by P.D. James and Ruth Rendell to contemporary series by Ann Cleeves, Susan Hill, and Deborah Crombie). My all-time favorite books are The Age of Innocence, In Cold Blood (the best not-a-novel I've ever read!), and from my childhood, Anne of Green Gables—I re-read these three books ever few years. I'm also a superfan of screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino.
In my own writing, I enjoy exploring complex family and friend relationships, multiple timelines, art and work, small town life, family secrets, and how the stories we tell ourselves reconcile with reality.