About the Author
Before moving to New York City, where I now live, I was employed, repeatedly, by the food service industry. A tendency to balk at having to talk to customers, however, cut short that career path and in time, I became an assigning editor at various magazines, including GQ and Allure.
For the past ten years, I’ve been a full-time writer. My work’s been in The New York Times, the Sunday Times magazine, the Washington Post, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vogue and Salon. I’ve been the recipient a New York Foundation for the Arts award and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, MacDowell, and Yaddo. I’ve written several books.
My first , The Red Devil: To hell with cancer, and back, details the clash of cultures that occurred when I contracted a dead-serious illness that denuded my head while working for magazines that exalted perfection.
My second book, Dreaming in Hindi: Coming awake in another language, is about a year I spent in in India, in Rajasthan, learning to speak Hindi. The story recounts events in what became a wild, sometimes dangerous year—there’s a naked photo scandal in the book, a murder plot, the slaughter of 2,000 people; the now-infamous Gujarat riots occurred not far from Udaipur, where I lived. There’s concentrated joy as well—I rode camels through the desert, taught art at a school for the deaf, spent afternoons with poets and evenings in palaces. And woven in between the stories about India, you’ll find a lot on the science of language acquistion--on what affects a second language actually has on your brain.
