Well, I certainly don’t profess to be another Tim O’Brien, David Carr, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Sinclair Lewis, Garrison Keillor, or Peggy Orenstein. But I, too, hail from the prairie and remain, first and foremost, a proud Prince/Dylan/Replacements-loving Minnesota girl. Like many writers, I’ve long found solace in the written word. My earliest efforts involved fashioning bits of cheesy nonsense into homemade gossip rags – typically adorned with photos of celebrities torn from National Enquirers. I enjoyed the luxury of growing up next door to two of my beloved grandmothers and these delighted them to no end.

Easily amused….

In 7th-grade, I penned Car Trouble, a riveting story about a family’s road trip in their beat-up Country Squire station wagon. Imagine my surprise when National Lampoon’s Vacation reared its head at the cineplex shortly thereafter. For years I felt certain its producers had somehow seen ~ and stolen ~ my story. Alas, publishing “success” first visited in 1990 when Spy magazine named me a finalist and ran a blurb from my  irreverent contest essay, “Becoming The Next Mrs. Donald Trump.” How prescient could one be? And, wow, if Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter liked me, surely I was destined for literary greatness!

So, I promptly became an attorney.

My babies ~ growing too fast

I practiced law for over a decade with a large Chicago-based firm and, after twenty years in the San Francisco Bay Area, my husband took the job of his dreams, we upped and joined the nomadic ranks of the Foreign Service and have since posted to Thailand, France, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and British Columbia. In the midst of our many transitions, I started pecking away, one thing led to another and, after hearing from hundreds of women in response to my December 2007 New York Times piece, I tackled my first book, The Twisted Sisterhood (Random House/Ballantine, 2010). TTS tracks the highs and lows of our female connections, explores the hidden fallout from incivility, competition, and negativity, and shoots to inspire a more mindful, positive style of relating.

Black-belted traveler

Packed with tons of research, light humor, bits of memoir, and the voices of over 3000 women, it’s a pro-female, conscious-raising-if-provocative call to arms, one I’m told has something for every girl and woman out there. (See The Book page for more details, follow me on Twitter, drop me a line through my Contact page, and/or head to the book’s Facebook page for upcoming news and events.)

Thanks for stopping by . . . .

More than anything, I love to laugh!