From an early age, I loved to make up stories. I used to direct my dolls, and later my classmates, in plays. I loved to stay home from school sick, because it gave me an excuse to sit in bed all day and write long, elaborate, overly detailed stories about girls at boarding school. My first break as a writer came in 1996, when a story of mine won the Writers@Work Fiction Fellowship. Over the next few years, other short stories were published in literary journals and in 1999 my collection of short fiction was published.
I’ve always loved the form of the personal essay, as a writer and a reader. When working as a freelancer in Berkeley in the late 1990s, I started publishing personal essays in a local newspaper. I began writing for national magazines like Bon Appétit and Real Simple. When Reader’s Digest picked up an article about prayer, I heard from Benedictine monks, housewives in Michigan, and men who parsed my words to scriptural chapter and verse. And then one day I talked to a priest friend who told me she’d been to visit a woman in the hospital, a woman who’d just had a lung transplant, a woman who was lying in bed with Reader’s Digest opened to my article on her chest. The woman’s daughter told my friend, having no idea she knew me, ‘That article is keeping my mother going.’
I realized my experience of prayer as a skeptic could reach other people, and I began writing The Water Will Hold You.
 |
Even at age 10, I had to memorialize everything — here, a vacation bedroom shot with my first camera. |
|
A favorite photo of my brother and me, despite the Vuarnets. |
 |