I grew up in Hartford, Connecticut in a neighborhood that straddled wealthy suburbs and underserved downtown communities. Having a foot in two worlds became a theme in my life that infused texture, complexity, and broadened understanding, but also a sense of not quite belonging anywhere. 

In public elementary school during a kickball match at recess, I became the first girl to kick the ball over the distant playground tunnel—a feat which rendered me both famous and undatable. Soon that burgeoning athleticism would help me survive six years in prep school where I was a tall, percipient, used-clothing-clad misfit among confident, clear-skinned offspring of real estate moguls, banking legends, and a cooking and entertainment magnate. But when my mother left our family to marry a farmer with ten children living in abject poverty in rural New York, suddenly my used clothing looked too fancy. Suddenly food wasn’t guaranteed. 

While at prep school and Cornell, I read Nietzsche on manicured campus greens, soaked up theories in grand lecture halls, and crammed for exams in ivy-covered libraries while spending summers dumpster diving, working hay fields from dawn to dusk, and sleeping on a cement floor with my belongings in a cardboard box. On the farm I was immersed in scarcity and struggle, but I kept going back even after I was old enough to choose otherwise. I think what drew me was the absence of pretense. And the visceral human connections. Or maybe I was simply more afraid of the privileged world from which I’d come. 

I’ve spent the decades since college in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Vermont, assisting small businesses and environmental and human health initiatives, falling in and out of love, and earnestly shaking off old, limiting ideas about what is and isn’t possible. 

I wrote The Wisdom of Winter while sitting on the floor of my dining room in the wee hours before dawn with the shades open to the night sky and my dog asleep at my feet. The story was inspired by real-life moments, a few remarkable people, and a newfound sense that I wasn’t who I thought I was . . . that at 57, I was only just beginning to understand what this whole life thing might be about.