I was fourteen when my brilliant mother fell apart. Learning to flourish despite that loss shaped who I became — and my novel. My heroine Julia faces a similar passage: before she can step boldly and with grace into her future, she must detoxify the grief from her past.
My mother was an outstanding doctor — graduating second in her 
class at Harvard Medical School, breaking the injunction against women interning at Harvard teaching hospitals, and doing groundbreaking research. A prestigious medical journal was dedicated to her memory. Mom was forty when she died.
Her love of story stays with me. She read to us every night, and recounted vivid tales of her own life.
Lupus took her mind before it took her life. When my brother, sister, and I visited her hospital bedside, she spoke of giving a lecture that week, convinced she’d stood at a podium. I kicked my sister’s legs under the bed to stop her from contradicting our mother; I didn’t want Mom to realize how completely she had lost herself.
Our father — foolishly — never again brought us to see her.
I carried unresolved grief and still worry about inheriting lupus.
But I’ve found much meaning, joy and richness in my life. I 
followed in Mom’s footsteps — to medical school and beyond —cherishing two children and three granddaughters along the way.
And I’ve loved birthing my novel.
The kernel of A Hidden Fate came to me in a dream: a true gift. Julia is not me. Her mother taught music, knew the name of every flower — she was warmth and wonder, not a scientist. Julia fears inheriting mental illness and Huntington’s disease, with its cruel 50-50 odds, not lupus. Her mother becomes psychotic when Julia is six, dying when Julia is fourteen. Not my life. Yet Julia’s terror and pain are like mine was and similar to the experiences of some of my patients, distilled.
When Julia unexpectedly becomes pregnant, her beloved husband demands she test and terminate the pregnancy if she carries the deadly gene. Julia agrees — but things don’t go as planned. Their marriage unravels, but their love story doesn’t end there.
An unexpected gift arrived for me forty years after my mother died. Wheeling, WV — her hometown — inducted her into its Hall of Fame. My brother and I went to the ceremony along with colleagues of hers. My father came.
At the ceremony, we celebrated Mom’s life and mourned, 
together. And I learned something about getting to the other side of grief — that drawing important others into the journey, as one opens to the pain of the past and deepens connection in the present, matters enormously.
A novelist transforms raw personal material into something more dramatic and universal. In the crucible of my psyche, the Wheeling experience — along with so much else I’ve learned through loving and living — fueled my novel — which Kirkus honored with a starred review.
I hope A Hidden Fate takes on a life of its own and will move you.
