I never thought I’d contribute to the vast canon of writers-on-writing essays, but here is one, called ‘There is No Handbook for This’ that I wrote about second-career writers (like me) for The Millions.

Thirteen years ago, my family and I pulled up stakes and relocated from New York City to our country house in a part of rural Connecticut that swells with city people (like we were) in the summertime. At first, I struggled mightily as I transitioned from urbanite to full time forest dweller in what had […]

May 2015 The artistry in travel writing is in how deftly one can dance between two seemingly disparate things. We must disappear into our new surroundings while maintaining the detachment that is required of the observer. Travel writing is about immersion, but it is also about being a stranger and an outsider. The task is […]

  This exceptionally punishing New England winter is, at long last, fading out. Grass is beginning to reveal itself in ash-colored patches around the yard. The snowdrifts that line both sides of the driveway are blackened from exhaust but slowly disintegrating into lower and lower ridges. I hope by Easter, the last chunk of snow […]

No sooner had I handed in the manuscript for 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go that I finally had a much-postponed lunch with an old friend. I had not seen her throughout the several months I spent in a dark cave writing, and behind the wheel of a little Citroën in France, researching this […]

After my first research trip for 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, I learned to pack an extra suitcase. A duffel bag from REI folded into its own little zipper case that slips right behind the rest of the stuff on the way over. The extra baggage fees are awful, of course, but 70 euros is a […]

A year ago, I had not yet begun to research my book, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go. In fact, I had a beautifully empty slate, a 4-week residency at Ragdale, a memoir I was itching to write there and a novel I was desperate to revise and get back into the market. Hard to […]

Last year, months before I was asked to write a book about France for Travelers’ Tales, I was explaining to a friend why I – let’s say – strongly encouraged my daughter to study French. For me it was simple. “Every girl should live for a while in Paris,” I said. Another person in the room […]

The town of Villefranche-sur-Mer seems to be rather mum on the subject of its most famous residents, the Rolling Stones. They lived there during the summer of 1971 in the Villa Nellcote, a mansion overlooking the Mediterranean, and recorded much of Exile on Main Streetwithin the seclusion of its iron grates. This was chronicled in folkloric, […]

When I get ready for a trip, I put different parts my life inside of a container. Toothpaste, a bathing suit, a raincoat, trousers for day and night, too many shoes. Never enough tank tops (which I wear under the sweaters I usually forget). What ends up in my suitcase is always an accident and […]

I have a new and exciting project – a book called, “100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go,” to be published by Travelers Tales in Palo Alto, CA in 2014. This is not a guidebook per se, but more of a bucket list with a women’s perspective for people who love France, or might yet […]

I’m here on the Côte d’Azur to gather background material for some magazine articles, in the place where luxury came to nestle over a century ago in custom-built mansions among wild jasmine and palm trees. The odors of rose and citrus seem to be brewed in the coves that carve giant scallops into the coastline. It’s […]