Author Bio
• Birth—April 9, 1962
• Where— San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of the Pacific
• Awards—American Book Award
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
In her words
From a Barnes & Noble interview
• I'm a seventh-generation Californian, and my great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, daughter, and myself were all born in San Francisco — my mother, daughter, and myself all at the same hospital.
• I decided I would be a writer when I was four years old, while sitting at my mother's feet as she sewed on her mother's old Singer sewing machine and told family stories with her mother and sisters (my grandmother and aunts). As little snips of fabric snowed down on me and I listened — unobserved — to the stories told by the women in my family, I suddenly realized that's all I wanted to do with my life: to tell stories.
• I have never been to a writing workshop, retreat, or residency program. The only writing class I ever took was as a sophomore in college, and I ended up dropping out of school for the semester and getting an Incomplete for the class. After college graduation I talked my way into a job as an editor at a small literary trade publishing house called North Point Press in Berkeley, California: My strategy was to learn to write, surreptitiously, by working with 'real' writers. I published my first short story when I was 23; the story was part of a fiction competition and was published with my photograph. Someone recognized me in the grocery store and I was so appalled to have my imagination made so public and personal that I didn't submit another piece of fiction to a publisher until Wintering, 14 years later.
• Though childhood convinced me that I was going to be a writer, motherhood is what gave me my subject. I don't think I had anything worth writing about until I started re-experiencing the world through the eyes of my children; it is the assembly of the self — through childhood, through relationships with other people, through parenthood — that fascinates me as a writer as well as a reader.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is what she said:
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. This was the first "adult" book that I ever read. I was 12 years old, and though I had decided by the age of 4 that I wanted to be a writer — a "storyteller" is how I thought of it then — it wasn't until I read The Yearling that I felt the imprint of an author's voice and heart and conscience on the story being told. The Yearling was my first exposure to the idea of a writer's craft: that a story is told through a writer's imagining of it, that the story didn't merely exist as a complete and separate entity.
As I read, I could detect how Mrs. Rawlings got inside the hearts and minds of each of her characters, and that they came alive, with all their frailties and dreams and losses, through her. Not only did the story of Jody and his love for his fawn, for his suffering parents and neighbors, lift off the pages for me, but so did their author. This, I realized for the first time, is what a genuine writer can do — put blood in the veins of characters who could not exist without her, and transmit them, feeling and alive, to a reader, and all of it through words. Many years later it sank in that this literary epiphany was given to me by a woman writer, making this book and what it means to me all the sweeter. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)