About Debbie
I became a writer because my husband died.
Had he lived, I’d probably still be playing online solitaire.
George and I had been together since I was a teenager. When he died of cancer in 2013, I was 50 years old and living alone for the first time in my life. I started writing because I needed somewhere to put all the thoughts of living without him. Plus, a lot of widow writing was upbeat and inspirational and I was just really pissed off.
Eventually I started dating, which gave me an entirely new collection of disasters to write about. I wrote Available As Is to help widows, but also because someone needed to advise midlife women about the often terrible state of single, middle-aged men.
One of those essays landed in The New York Times’ Modern Love. I earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Saint Mary’s College of California and eventually published Available As Is: A Midlife Widow’s Search for Love.
Before all this, I was an insurance coverage attorney who retired at 40. It’s about as exciting as it sounds. I never planned to become a writer, much less one who was motivated by loss.
Today I write about grief, dating, aging, reinvention and relationships later in life. Lately I’ve been writing about sobriety and caring for elderly parents, and finding them oddly overlapping. So basically, I write about trying to building a meaningful life after the one you expected disappears.
When I’m not writing, you’ll usually find me at yoga, hiking Northern California trails, hanging out with my second life partner Randal, trying new beauty products or mentally rewriting the endings of popular movies.