It’s probably no surprise that Adolph Hitler was quite interested in the writings of American eugenics leaders in the 1920s and 30’s. Every state had eugenic laws in place, and California, where I am from, performed more sterilizations than any other state and for a longer stretch of years. Epileptics were sterilized, people of low-to-average intelligence were sterilized, even promiscuous young women were sterilized, as if promiscuity were a byproduct of a haywire hereditary gene. Often the criteria was rather nebulous and shocking.

Bell ruling set a precedent for states to legally do this. The way this was accomplished was by sterilizing young men and women in state hospitals who possessed what elites called undesirable traits, and the Buck v. She was caught up in the eugenics movement of the early 1920s when there was a huge push to manipulate the American gene pool so that only so-called desireable people produced desireable people. The book I am working on right now, with the working title ONLY THE BEAUTIFUL, is inspired by a rather sad Supreme Court case involving a young woman named Carrie Buck. My first novel was published when I was 44, and I have been in this lane ever since. I finally concluded I would rather live with rejection then regret. But it wasn't until I was 42 that I summoned the courage to try writing a novel even though I had wanted to do so for a long time.

My first professional writing gig was working for a newspaper, a job I started in my 30s.

I’ve since learned though that you can do a job you love and it may even take you to the mat at times but you can still love it. I didn't want writing to turn into that kind of drudgery. I also I stupidly thought that if I did it make writing my job I would tire of it because I saw too many people coming home from the work week tired, longing for the weekend, and dreading Mondays. I didn't think of it as anything I would do professionally. In my teen and early adult years I thought my writing was just for fun, as kind of a therapy for me, more recreational than anything else. I have always loved to write, even when I was a little girl.

The nature of fragile things book