About Debbie
I became a writer because my husband died.
Had he lived, I’d probably still be buying handbags.
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 warn midlife women about the occasionally alarming state of online dating.
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. I never imagined I’d become a writer, much less one whose career began with heartbreak.
Today I write about grief, dating, love, aging, sobriety, reinvention, and caring for elderly parents, the messy business of building a meaningful life after the one you expected disappears.
When I’m not writing, you’ll usually find me hiking Northern California trails, wandering museums, planning my eventual move to Pacific Grove, or trying to convince myself I don’t need another cup of coffee.