I am somewhat obsessed with clothes. I recently packed away my winter woolies and discovered that my warm-weather wardrobe was down to three dresses, three wearable pairs of capris and a mess of t-shirts, where mess = stained and pilled.  (I must have done a thorough edit last fall.) So I started shopping, looking to have my fancy struck. But in the process…

= snoozefest, right? We sit behind a table and take turns addressing the audience. The moderator introduces. The writers pontificate. Another panel on “[Jewish] Women of the Book” is forgotten almost before it’s over. Not this time. Thanks to Bari Weiss, Associate Books Editor at the Wall Street Journal, the questions were not all softballs.…

Reviewers tend to describe my novels as “character driven.” I not entirely sure what that means but I’ve been repeating it for years. It suggests, I suppose, that my fiction is longer on dialogue than plot or physical description. Given the title, cover image and first-person narrator of my new novel, it would be fair…

The ideas for my novels come to me in different ways.  I picked up a booklet in a Gloucester bookstore and discovered the history of the oldest settlement on Cape Ann and The Last Days of Dogtown followed. On my first visit to Israel, a tour took me to a living history museum called Atlit,…

I never quite bought into the idea of the yoga “community.” I’ve taken yoga classes for more than twenty years from a succession of teachers in rooms full of familiar-looking faces whose names I never knew. And yet, the news of B.K.S. Iyengar’s passing on Aug. 20 at the age of 95 felt like a…

   Four months ago, my therapist told me she would be retiring this summer. I was taken aback –a phrase that suddenly made perfect sense to me since I felt as though I had been physically moved without my consent. In a way, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. We had been slowing…