What I write about is best explained with a biographical fact.

After a secret pregnancy when was 17 years old, I gave up my newborn son for adoption. The baby was given a new name and a new birth certificate. His existence was kept from nearly everyone I knew for two decades. And so my own life became a fiction.

I’m interested in the hidden, in mysteries, why people lie and how we find out the truth. I’m interested in regrets, and how people manage to get out of bed the next morning anyway.

In both fiction and nonfiction, I look for the opening that softens the heart rather than hardens it. I want to figure out how misery can turn us toward mercy instead of misunderstanding.

My stories and essays take place at the bedsides of the dying, during desperate road trips, in Hollywood, at storefront clinics where people sell blood plasma, and in fancy suburban houses. I write about getting old, wild teenage girls on motorcycles, and the mountain lions that stalk Angelenos. I write about truth and lies. And about how the world falls apart when we can’t tell the difference between them.

In my collages, the story is literally in pieces. I put it together morsel by morsel and maybe the story the viewer sees is different from the one I see. These days I think a lot about the planet Earth, our Mother. I think about my failings as a mother. And how all of us are failing the Earth. I think about saints, sinners, halos, hell, misogyny, and polar bears.