A Brief Personal Note:
Twenty years ago, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on marriage as metaphor — starting with biblical stories of suspicion, betrayal, and broken covenants. My scholarship was about how married couples could overcome violent jealousy, then go home to lead normal lives.
Then my own marriage broke. Not with a catastrophe or an affair, but slowly, under the heavy weight of maintaining a household, raising children, and couples therapy sessions that somehow made everything worse. I got stuck in a world that didn’t feel fair, and my rage filled up all the space around me, as well as that of my husband and children.
I’m now writing a memoir about how my marriage broke and didn’t end. In fact, quite the opposite: falling in love with someone I was already married to turned out to be the best thing I ever did.
“To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten.”
The Rest of the Record:
I hold a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Antioch University. I’ve taught at Stanford, the University of San Francisco, and San Francisco State, and I’m a member of the National Book Critics Circle. I still teach periodically at local high schools. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my husband and four children.
Writing
When I’m not writing about marriage, I write about books, the craft of writing, or current events. Back when blogging was more of a thing, I enjoyed writing about literature, theater, and film. You can still explore the archives, and bemoan with me the days when writing on the internet was an exciting adventure, and not a contribution to LLM training. Every so often, I like to photograph the stack of books I’m reading.
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