About

I have had an interesting career since graduating from Smith College in 1967. My first jobs were mainly secretarial, first at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and then at publishing houses in New York City. Before arriving in New York, where I moved with a boyfriend in the fall of 1968, I did a six-week waitressing stint working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. in a casino in South Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

 

In 1972, I got a lucky break and landed a job as assistant to George Plimpton, which led to becoming managing editor of The Paris Review in 1974. I went on to be managing editor at two short-lived national bimonthlies, Quest/77–79 and Next. A year after Next folded, I became a senior editor at New York Magazine before starting a career as a freelance writer and editor in 1983.

 

My articles and interviews have been published in The Paris Review, Quest/77, People, Women’s Day, and other magazines. My poetry has appeared in Ms., The Paris Review, Antioch Review, Northwest Review, Antioch Review, Works, and other little magazines, and in Best Poems of 1976: Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards 1977.

 

During my freelance years, I authored a nonfiction book, The Biological Clock: Balancing Marriage, Motherhood and Career, based on interviews with one hundred women from around the country who responded to my survey in Working Woman magazine in which I asked the question, “How do you feel about having a child?” It was published by Doubleday in 1988, reissued by Penguin/Putnam in paperback in 1989, and translated into German under the title Kinder Ja, Aber Später.

 

Despite these accomplishments, for many years I went through life with a bottle in one hand and a man in the other. In 1972, the same month I started working for George Plimpton, I became involved with William Plummer (later to become the author of The Holy Goof, Buttercups and Strong Boys, and Wishing My Father Well), whom I married in 1978. We had two children: Nick, born in 1979, and Samantha in 1986. We divorced in 1990. My second marriage, to a lawyer I met through the personals in New York Magazine, was a short one that also ended in divorce.

 

In June 1995 I walked into my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I was gradually changed, through sobriety, into a woman who is no longer empty inside and has no need to escape reality by disappearing down a bottle of booze. In sobriety, I have endured some of the worst of what life can offer: the death of my son Nick, a philosophy major, who died of an accidental overdose while a senior in college in February 2001. Ten weeks later, Bill Plummer died of a massive heart attack, leaving behind Sam, age fourteen, and me, as a truly single parent. We got through our grief together, and I did not drink. More than twenty-five years have passed since then. Sam has grown up and become a sociologist, wife, and mother of son. We have a close relationship.

During my sobriety, I’ve grown up and retrieved my creative force.

• I started writing poetry again, and compiled a collection, Recovering Myself: A Memoir in Poetry.  

• I wrote a novel, Behind Their Backs, a tale of adultery, alcoholism, domestic violence, and redemption, set in Philadelphia in 1955.

• I put together and edited a book of my father’s and my extensive correspondence while I was at Smith, Dear Miss Terranova. His letters helped me though this difficult formative period.

• I’ve written a memoir, Disobedient Memories: My Hidden Childhood Revealed, based in large part on diaries and letters my mother wrote throughout my upbringing, which in many cases contradict my own memories.

 

See my Books page for more information on my publications as well as links to them.