Biography & Other Assorted Personal Stuff
Born and raised in Missouri, I now live in Queens with my two cats and one husband. I am the author of Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic as well as an assortment of articles, essays, and ill-conceived bits of satire - many of which can be found on this site. I’m currently at work on my second book, Trip of the Tongue: A Cross-Country Quest for American Language, Culture, and Identity, which will be published by Bloomsbury in late 2010.
As a child I was initially too practical to consider writing as a career: I only wanted titles that ended in “ologist.” But my parents gave me a library instead of a little brother, and even if the allure of language hadn’t proven to be temptation enough, I still would have felt duty-bound to punish my parents by choosing a financially insolvent profession. A writer I would be.
However, it took me a while to get there.
After an adolescence characterized far more by books than by beaux, I graduated from high school and decamped to Harvard, where I wrote rather less than I hoped. I took as many language classes as I could, and I wrote and edited for the Let’s Go travel series (which took me to China one year and a stuffy Cambridge office the next). I also spent a summer interning for a screenwriter in LA (which took me primarily to a series of traffic jams on the 405). Unfortunately, I also had to graduate, so I also took a bunch of stuffy classes on politics, economics, and Marxism. Pages upon pages of German political theory addled my brain so much that, by the time I graduated, I had convinced myself I wanted to be an academic.
So I went to UCSD to begin work on a doctorate in comparative politics.
Shortly thereafter, I remembered that I had no interest in graduate-level comparative politics.
And so I gained the dubious distinction of being the first member of my program to cut and run. Afterwards, I spent six months in Tuscany learning Italian, racking up a shitload of credit-card debt, and generally "finding myself."
Mostly, I found that I enjoy drinking in the afternoon.
In 2004, I realized I had no particularly marketable skills. So I decided that I might as well move to New York. My first published piece, an essay on language and language obsession, appeared in The New York Times in November 2006. In December of the same year, I was contracted to write my first book, Biting the Wax Tadpole.
I have been working full time as a writer (and occasional oh-balls-I-can’t-pay-my-cell-phone-bill freelance editor) ever since.