About Me
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I am a retired lawyer, married, and mother of three. I grew up in a traditional Long Island Catholic family of the 1960s/1970s. For three of my teenage years, I suffered from religious scruples, without any treatment. As it often happens, I did “grow out” of the most intense scrupulosity, but still struggle today with some obsessive behavior (not unusual for lawyers). After graduating from Wellesley College and Harvard Law School, I worked as a tax lawyer for Congress and in private practice. Today, I live outside Washington DC, and in addition to writing, I volunteer for both Catholic and nondenominational charities and teach adult education.
New to fiction, I have published many articles on tax, health and benefits law, and am the author of an online tax guide called Reasonable Compensation, published by Bloomberg Tax. (It’s only useful to readers of this website if the IRS challenges the compensation that you earn as too great or too small.) My computer’s “desk drawer” holds drafts of short stories and novels based on some of the cases I’ve researched over the years; they really are stranger than fiction!
My first novel, Next to Godliness, lived in my head for years before I retired, but still took six years to complete. I wanted to write about Catholic life in the 1960s and started with the story of a nun who left the convent. Other characters took over and the book became the tale of a young teenager and her mother as they navigated the changes in the Church and society. The novel’s twist is that the teenager, Grace, develops “religious scruples” a mental illness whose sufferers feel they must follow religious rules perfectly. Though there are many books written about the 1960s, few focus on the life of an ordinary family faced with the challenges of those times. I also had fun with the basketball portion of my book, which illustrates the outdated rules of women’s basketball that still existed in the 1960s.
I hope you will find time to follow my twisted journey a newbie author. You can connect with me via CONTACT ME on this website or on Facebook . And I ask you, please, to be a “gentle reader” who is kind to a new entrant into the literary realm. (It wouldn’t hurt for all of us to be kind to everyone, would it ?)