In the fall of 1982, which now feels like a long, long time ago, I left suburban New York for journalism school at Northwestern University with three duffel bags of clothing, a blue Smith-Corona electric typewriter, and the notion that creative writers toiled away in obscurity while journalists actually earned a living. One thing you could surely count on in the early 1980s was that the crusty former newspapermen at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism would give you a quick, no-frills education in reporting and writing. Over the next four years, I developed a solid foundation in researching, interviewing, and editing. Unfortunately, I was a terrible news reporter. We were trained to write stories in the inverted pyramid format, placing the most pertinent and newsworthy information at the top, but I was much more interested in the facts and details that pooled at the bottom. My copyediting professor noticed this, and suggested that I give magazine journalism a try. Which was how my passion for magazines began. I began my journalism career with an internship at Outside magazine, which was then based in Chicago, and soon after spent three months writing news and feature articles for the Salem Statesman-Journal. My first full-time editorial job out of college was in Knoxville, Tennessee, working for the now-defunct Whittle Communications publishing empire of the 1980s. In the three years I spent there, I got a crash course in editing, marketing, and magazine development. I also shared a house in North Knoxville for six months with the inimitable Spike Gillespie and learned how to climb rocks, grow roses, and fry green tomatoes. In 1989 I headed to the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program, one of the first of its kind, for a master’s degree in what was then called “expository writing.” Creative nonfiction was still an amorphous term, and in Iowa City there was the constant excitement of working in what felt like a rapidly emerging genre. I had the opportunity to work with exceptional writing instructors in Iowa, such as Carl Klaus, Mary Swander, Carol Bly, and Scott Russell Sanders. Mary was the first person to encourage me to write about my mother’s death and the impact it had on me, which was how Motherless Daughters began. I headed to New York in the summer of 1992, already under contract with Addison-Wesley. After a year of research and another year of writing, Motherless Daughters was published in 1994, quickly followed in 1995 by Letters from Motherless Daughters, an edited collection of letters from readers. Motherless Daughters was a first-time author’s dream book: two months after publication, it hit The New York Times bestseller list, and eventually went on to be published in seven foreign languages. I hit the media and lecture circuit in 1994 and 1995, with appearances in the U.S., Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand. Life slowed down a bit professionally as it sped up personally in 1997, when I moved to California, married my husband Uzi, and gave birth to my first daughter, Maya, all in a ten-month span. In 1999, on shockingly small amounts of sleep, I managed to publish Mother of My Mother, a book about women’s relationships with their grandmothers. Soon after, I started teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University-LA, a position I’ve held on and off for the past five years. I can also be found every July at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, where I teach two weeklong workshops in memoir and personal essay writing. Along the way, my work has been published in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, Glamour, Child, Parenting, Seventeen, Real Simple, Self, The Iowa Review, and The Crab Orchard Review, as well as in the anthologies The Bitch in the House, Toddler, and the forthcoming Blindsided by a Diaper. I sit on the boards of Motherless Daughters of Orange County, which provides support and services to women whose mothers died during childhood and adolescence; PEN USA, a writers’ organization that promotes the written word and defends writers in peril; and Mommy’s Light Lives On, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that helps motherless kids remain connected to their moms.
My second daughter, Eden, was born in 2001. These days, we can all be found living in a pink house at the top of Topanga Canyon, where I play guitar (though not well); occasionally cook a mean lasagna; and attend bellydancing class with my kids. I’ve recently discovered that I’m also very, very good at third-grade math although, according to Maya, Daddy is still better at checkers and paper airplanes. |
