About

I wrote my first story when I was five.

As I recall, it pertained to a king, a princess, and some missing treasure, though not necessarily in that order. At the end of the tale, it is revealed that the king had died of a broken heart—at the age of 96. My parents found this hilarious.

The point is, I have been telling stories for a long time. In eighth grade I entered the archdiocesan essay contest, whose topic was “What the Canonization of St. John Neumann Means to Me.” Evidently it meant quite a lot: I won. It was then, at the tender age of 13, that I decided I was going to be a writer. Not many people determine their careers in grammar school, but I did. 

I was blessed to work as a writer and editor during an era when American magazines were still glossy, thick, and glamorous. My career took me from Atlantic City to northern New Jersey to Boston to New York to Philadelphia and, eventually, out to Los Angeles. I’ve worked as an editor at and written for some of the most storied titles in publishing: Vanity Fair, Esquire, ESPN The Magazine, Departures, Town & Country, The Hollywood Reporter, and Golf Digest, among many others. As an editor I’ve worked with some incredible award-winning writers, including Buzz Bissinger, Jessica Pressler, Simon van Zuylen-Wood, Terry McMillan, Alexandra Styron, Samantha Power, and Benjamin Wallace, to name a few. Today I am proud to be the editorial director at UCLA Magazine, helping to tell the story of the top-ranked public university in the nation, while also serving as an occasional contributing critic for both the New York Times Book Review and W. 

My first foray into writing fiction came in the form of a 120,000-word manuscript I finished in the early aughts that was, in a word, terrible. But its mere existence proved to me that I could actually thread together a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In 2010, I wrote a story for Vanity Fair about the history of the old Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63^rd Street, and that set me on the road to my first novel, Searching for Grace Kelly, which was published in 2015. I am so enormously grateful that, decades after penning those first fantastical stories written in crayon at the family dining room table, I am able to continue to tap into my ever-vivid imagination and craft tales, and have people actually read them. Even if the kings no longer die heartbroken at 96.