ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As you can see from this photo, I’m not a young woman – in fact, I’m in my 70’s. But I feel much younger than my birthday-candle total because of the years I’ve spent exploring, as fully as I could, the underlying meanings of fairy tales, myths, movies and Broadway shows based on the same themes.

After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, I worked as a freelance
journalist for many years, writing articles for the old Life magazine, Esquire and Sports Illustrated among others while living in Rye, New York with my husband and three children. When my youngest child was ten, and my husband in his fifties, I worked up the courage to jump off an intellectual cliff and see if I could fly. I wrote my first book, a science fiction fantasy for older children, with no realistic hope of having it published. Fate gives us what we want, I learned, but not the way we wanted it. On the day of my husband’s funeral, I found a letter in my mailbox from a publisher accepting the book.

For the next two years, I wrote nothing. Like Sleeping Beauty, my inner self went to sleep in order to give my emotions time to catch up with the new realities I faced. When I awoke, I wrote in another voice. The first result was a series of weekly "Hers" columns and then essays for The New York Times, which developed into the nucleus of Spirals (Random House), a memoir of my life as daughter, wife, mother, mother-in-law, widow and grandmother.

Spinning Straw into Gold is an expansion of that voice. It has taken me 12 years to write, during which it has been my constant companion and troublemaker.

In addition to writing, I have been an avid small boat sailor for 40 years. I was one of the first women in this part of the country to own and race my boat in one-design competition without my husband or children on board, none of whom would set foot in a sailboat. I continue to sail, but no longer compete. On water.