The short version:

I grew up in the small town of Wenham, Massachusetts. After college and a short stint in graduate school, I spent ten years in the film industry as a writer and producer. Eventually, I abandoned my screen ambitions to write fiction full time. I am currently at work on a novel about surveillance and high stakes testing. I live in both New York and London with my daughter, Adelina, and my husband, Andrew Woffinden.

The long version:

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Bruges with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for…

Just kidding (but ten points if you can identify the quote).

Here’s my somewhat less intriguing story:

I grew up in a very small town called Wenham, Massachusetts, which is about 20 miles north of Boston. It’s near Salem but is relatively witch-free, as far as I know. I had a rather normal, crisis-free upbringing, which has utterly deprived me of personal horror stories from which to draw for my fiction. I even got along swimmingly with my younger brother, Mark, who still lives in Massachusetts. The parents in Cycler are very definitely not based on my own parents, who are both lovely people who live in Florida. My Dad was a mason contractor until very recently and my mother works in philanthropic administration. As a teenager I was quite unremarkable–fairly popular, but not obnoxiously so. I played sports, wrote a ton of poetry, and got involved in student government.

I went to Holy Cross College in 1985 with the wildly misguided idea that it would help me understand what it meant to be Catholic. I wound up an atheist within one semester. After graduating in 1989, I spent one year at N.Y.U. where I studied cultural anthropology only to realize that success in that field meant teaching cultural anthropology to other graduate students. The recursive pointlessness of that endeavor resulted in an existential crisis and a quick decision to drop out. I make all of my most important decisions quickly. It sometimes works.

I began working in film production in 1991. It wasn’t glamorous. I worked as a Production Assistant on very low budget independent films and music videos but worked my way up quickly to become a line producer. Favorite comic memories include shooting a B52’s video in Woodstock New York and being asked by a very irritated Kate Pierson to procure vodka for the band in the middle of the night despite the fact that everything was closed. Although the band was dropped by their label after we completed the music video, I do not believe my failure to procure vodka was the main reason.

I started writing screenplays around this time, one of which was Cycler. Around 1994, I caught the attention of John Dunning and Mike Paseornek who worked at Canadian film company, Cinepix Films. They hired me to write a screenplay for them, then to join Mike in opening a New York production and development office for Cinepix. That company blossomed (exploded actually) into what is now Lions Gate Films. I wrote several screenplays while working there, three of which were produced and several of which are still on somebody’s development roster for all I know. But Cycler remained unfinished. While at Lions Gate, I developed and produced a number of films, learned the intricacies of deal-making and film finance, and wound up with some oddly useful life skills–like how to write sight gags and how to convince actors their trailers are all the same size (even when they’re not).

In the spring of 2000, I read Dan Simmons Hyperion series, an epic space quadrilogy. Shortly thereafter I found myself writing what appeared to be a novel. Before I could stop myself I’d written almost thirty-thousand words and realized that this is what I had to do. So I did what any responsible adult with a lucrative, upwardly-mobile career in the film industry would do. I quit.

After completing that first novel and another, the memory of my unfinished screenplay, Cycler, began to clamor for attention. I obeyed its demands because I honestly believe Cycler is the story I was born to tell. As for where the original idea came from, I can only answer that it came from the same place all of my stories come from, the question: what if? What if you were neither a boy nor a girl? What if you were both a boy and a girl? For me, all good fiction is a question rather than an answer and those were the questions I needed to ask. Incidentally, I still don’t have the answers.

As for the usual biographical data, I have no pets, but I do have some hobbies. I run, dance and love to bake. Probably the pursuit that takes up most of my time, other than writing, is music. I taught myself how to play the piano about four years ago and have been composing music on my laptop ever since.

Favorite authors include Kurt Vonnegut, William Gibson, Meg Rosoff, Dan Simmons, Emily Bronte, John Milton, Anthony Burgess, Cintra Wilson, and Virginia Woolf.

P.S. the quote was from Austin Powers