My fourth grade teacher wasn’t surprised that I wound up reading for a living, because I gave 250 book reports that year. All I wanted to do was read. I had a terrific fake cough and would use that to stay home from school with a pile of books.
I grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut and my family was close to the family of Maxwell Perkins, the great editor at Scribner’s. Max had died before I was born, but I grew up knowing what an editor was. Max’s daughter, Bertha Perkins Frothingham, shared my passion for books and encouraged my reading in every way. One of my favorite books was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle, which led me to take physics in college. I struggled with that course, but when I botched a lab my professor let me write a story related to physics, which became my first published story. As a creative writing major, a job in publishing seemed like the right path. 