About Me

After years of writing occasional non-fiction - academic writing, sales pitch decks, and marketing copy for a start-up I co-founded, I became interested in a new hobby: writing fiction. I've had a story idea for years (and won't reveal it since it's a central twist to the book), but I found a way to tie that idea to some of the feelings I held onto after my sister's suicide in 2009.   After working on both ideas in parallel, I combined them into this novel, a partial memoir and a partial fictionalization of my personal experience. 

My sister Melissa was smart, beautiful, and the life of the party.  This is us together in 1983 before things fell apart between us.

I was born and raised in New Jersey and used a lot of my childhood and young adulthood as inspirations for the locations and content in the book. I graduated from Oberlin College in 1995. I worked at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, for a year before returning to graduate school at the University of Minnesota. I currently live in Grantham, NH, with my husband Andy, our daughter Tess and our dog Gary. When I am not thinking about this book, I am a VP of Sales at a Boston-based software startup.