I’m a Jersey Girl who keeps trying to leave.....and keeps coming back. After growing up in the New Jersey suburb of Norwood, I went to journalism school at the University of Wisconsin and then moved to New York, where I wrote short stories and waitressed at a long-defunct pub called Peggy Doyle’s, the model for Declan McGlynn’s bar in The Man I Should Have Married..

Yada yada yada (yes, I’m yadaing lots of sex, plus a few extremely unglamorous journalism jobs), I became shoe and lingerie editor of Glamour magazine. I had no idea what I was doing, but figured this was a move that would help me become a professional writer. During my six years at Glamour, I married Dick Satran, now an editor at Reuters, and had my first child, my daughter Rory, who lives in Paris and has recently finished her own first novel.

When Linda and I sold our first baby-naming book in 1987, I had enough money to leave Glamour and start freelancing. The flexibility of working at home made it possible for me to have two more children – my sons Joe and Owen are now 17 and 13 – and to move to both London and California for my husband’s career.

It was in California that I began seriously to write fiction again, laboring on the book that was to become The Man. I took a class with the lovely Ann Packer, joined a writing group, and then was lucky enough to enroll in Elizabeth George’s fabulous fiction-writing seminar, where I finally learned to write a novel.

Our family has been resettled in Montclair, New Jersey, where we’ve lived on and off for 20 years, since 2000, in a big green wreck of a house that we’ve made slightly less of a wreck. Our house is currently starring in its own TV commercial, which you can see here. I just want to be clear that most of that is not my furniture, except the black chair on which "Grandma" is sitting.

A few years ago I started a group called Montclair Editors & Writers, which has nearly 700 members. Every Friday, I meet with my novelists’ group, Alice Elliott Dark, Christina Baker Kline, and Benilde Little. Occasionally, I teach a class called “How To Write A Novel.”

But mostly, when I’m not with my family, and even sometimes when I am, I write. I try to write fiction in the morning, and then work on magazine articles or name books or other non-fiction writing in the afternoon. I am one of those people who gets antsy on Christmas and on vacation or whenever I’m not writing; I need it as much as I need chocolate. More.

Read my 'interview on writing'