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, long an editor at Reuters who is now producing a business news site for Fiedelity, and had my first child, my daughter Rory, who lives in Paris and is an editor of Self Service Magazine.

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'