Two years ago, I was grieving my mother. I had no plan to become a novelist. And now I get to say something that still feels a little strange: Koehler Books will publish my debut novel, The Penny, on May 11, 2027. I’m enormously grateful to Joe Coccaro, who convinced me to take the leap and sign with Koehler, and to Jon Koehler for seeing something in this story, the generations of women, the mothers and daughters, the nurses and midwives, and everything underneath what happe

Today I turn 60.. Today still no book deal.. It all started six months ago, armed with nothing but a dream and a manuscript that I was convinced could tell a valuable story of women, nurses, mothers, daughters, grief, secrets and little bit of spice. As I navigated through the labyrinth, I felt like Indiana Jones, dodging boulders of rejection and swinging over pits of despair. Each query sent was like tossing a message in a bottle into the vast ocean of publishing. And what

I thought finishing the book would feel like relief. It did. But not in the way I expected. My editor kept saying, “You’ll know when it’s done.” I kept thinking, That feels wildly optimistic for someone who has never done this before. She was calm about it. Certain. Like, this was all very normal. write a novel, get an agent, casually end up in a bookstore. I know healthcare systems. I do not know publishing. So when I typed “The End,” I had absolutely no idea what I had jus

My mother was a woman of quiet, ferocious dignity. After my father died, something in her left too. What followed wasn't grief in the ordinary sense. It was a five-year unraveling I could document clinically and could not stop personally. I was a nurse. I thought I knew death. I did not know this. Read the full essay →