And maybe that would have been my life story. However, in my sophomore year at the University of California at Berkeley, a roommate suggested that if I liked writing so much, I ought to apply for a spot on the student newspaper, The Daily Californian. "Newspapers? Hack writing!" I scoffed. (Also, I didn't actually read any newspapers back then.) Nevertheless, I walked into the Daily Cal office, got my first assignment—and was happily hooked for the next several decades.  

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I wrote (on staff or long-term freelance) for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Scientist, Newsday, Institutional Investor, Working Woman, and other newspapers and magazines in California, New Jersey, and New York. I met President Clinton in the White House and visited elementary schools in Silicon Valley, toured drug-company labs in Switzerland and watched a robbery trial in Hackensack. Just when the yearly news cycle had grown too predictable, the publisher John Wiley & Sons offered me a contract for a nonfiction book that became The Merck Druggernaut. (Yes, I was old enough to sign a contract by then.) I eagerly dug into this new type of intensive research and writing, ultimately publishing six more nonfiction books—mainly about consumer activism, Big Money, and health care—and winning several awards. (For instance, Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love was named one of the best books of 2012 by Library Journal, and Pension Dumping was a ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2008.)  

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Then my parents died, within seven months of each other. That's the kind of blow that makes a person think about mortality—and dreams. 

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 Whatever happened to the novels I was going to write? In fact, I'd never stopped writing fiction. I just hadn't taken it seriously. So I pulled out one of the many manuscripts I'd started during all those years, and this time I finished it.

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The result: In 2018, Stephen F. Austin State University Press published that manuscript, The Heirs. Four years later, my second published novel, I Meant to Tell You, was a finalist or winner of nine awards, including the Sarton Award and the Eric Hoffer Award. 

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Even while writing those two, I was also writing a third novel. And rewriting. And rewriting. And... (I will never publicly reveal how many rewrites I plowed through to produce HER DAUGHTER.)