I was born and raised in New York City; my first home was Greenwich Village. I went to a bunch of schools, including two years at a public high school, before finishing up at a ragtag prep school in Connecticut (the setting for my novel The Hour Between).

At 17, I moved to San Francisco, ostensibly to go to San Francisco State College. It was the late sixties and the classroom had a hard time competing with my adolescent craving for adventure and the carnival of the times. I stayed in that dreamy town for seven years, leaving behind my heart and quite a few brain cells.

I moved back to New York City and tried to be an actor. I didn’t have the chops (or the talent), although it was fun appearing as the only man in the off-Broadway hit Women Behind Bars (I hope there are no photos of my nude scenes) and on Broadway in the bomb Legend, starring that spitfire Elizabeth Ashley.

I started writing plays, a surefire way not make a living. To bring in the bacon (which I was still eating back then) I had every job you can imagine: cabdriver (I loved getting fares to forgotten corners of the city); medical transcriptionist; wine salesman; really bad waiter. For a while I lived in an atmospheric little aerie on top of a brownstone -- reached by a private staircase, it had skylights, a roof deck, a clawfoot tub, ancient appliances, it was like being back in the 1940s.

My plays started getting produced off-off Broadway at places like La Mama, Theater for the New City, and The Kitchen. I made some lifelong pals and we would work together again and again, spending hours in cafes after rehearsals. It was la vie boheme circa 1980s. I ended up having close to twenty productions – Michael Musto, bless his heart, called me “the poet laureate of the Lower East Side” -- and it never stopped being a thrill to see my work up on stage.

I also wrote a few screenplays that were optioned, and had some fun experiences out in Hollywood. Especially when Madonna was interested in doing one of my plays and arranged a reading at her bungalow on the Warners lot. The mouth on that girl!

Twenty years ago I fell truly madly deeply in love with a fella I met at a scruffy writers’ colony in Vermont (it was very hard to get into – you had to call them up). I moved to delightful, bosky Cambridge and have been here ever since. I’ve ghostwritten in every genre imaginable, have published four novels, and write a fundraiser called Banned in Boston every year. When I’m not writing, I like to take long walks, run, do a little yoga, read, go to museums, and dance around the kitchen to eclectic playlists Steve puts together.

My love affair with the Hudson Valley/Catskills began over thirty years ago, when I bought a small cottage beside a big stream in West Saugerties. I spent my first summer there exploring the hidden byways and quirky towns, something I still love to do. It’s a wonderfully diverse area in every way, filled with fun, fascinating people and, of course, a lot of mystery.