I was born and raised in Boston, where my mother was the first female intern in internal medicine at a Harvard teaching hospital. As a child, I huddled under blankets with a flashlight to secretly read novels late into the night. I organized a student-run course on Women's History (the first history course on the subject accredited by Swarthmore College) and graduated with honors in history and philosophy.
I attended medical school at Johns Hopkins. After graduating, I served on the full-time academic faculty in psychiatry at Hopkins and subsequently at Stanford University School of Medicine. More recently, I've had a highly successful private practice in Northern California.
The kernel of my first novel came to me in a dream, unbidden, and then insisted on emerging while I was raising my children and working as a physician in Silicon Valley. The story draws on my experiences as director of the Huntington's disease clinic at Johns Hopkins in the 1980's, when a genetic test first was developed to predict whether someone at risk to inherit Huntington's would develop the disease. Huntington's is a ghastly and fatal illness with onset in the prime of life. I worked with patients and their families faced with wrenching choices about whether they wanted to know what fate held in store for them in midlife. This affected me deeply.
These experiences, and others from years of medical practice, including my patients' experiences with 23andMe, inform my fiction and infuse it with credibility and compassion.