I'm the author of the new novel, French Lessons, published by Ballantine in 2011. My first novel, On a Night Like This, was a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller. It has been translated into six languages. I'm also the editor of two anthologies, Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex and Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, which was a New York Times Editors Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller. I have published numerous essays in anthologies, including The Other Woman, and a dozen of my short stories have appeared in literary and commercial magazines. I was named a San Francisco Library Laureate in 2004 and 2009. I've been awarded fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Ledig House, Ucross, Ragdale Foundation, Writers at Work, Wesleyan Writers Conference and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I teach writing through Stanford Continuing Studies and in private classes out of home home. I have two daughters and live with my husband in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was born in Trenton, NJ and have lived in Boston, Philly, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Paris and Northern California. I have worked lots of jobs including tennis instructor, restaurant manager, and college teacher but through all the transmutations of my life I have been writing, since the age of six, stubbornly, persistently, with great cockiness and wild insecurity, through praise and piles of rejection letters. I have given up my writing career many times, but only for a day or two, and my family has now learned to ignore my new career choices. I am a writer, an almost daily writer, a writer who actually loves to write.