People like to believe their disaster is custom-made. That no one else has sat in that kitchen at 2 a.m. with a secret that would split the house if it stood up. I write because that belief is a kind of loneliness, and loneliness is a liar.
When I finished Torn Lives, the reason was simple. I wanted the page to hold the issues most of us live and almost none of us discuss: the betrayal you did not see, the love that has a violent twin, the vengeance that feels clean until you have to live with it. We bury the pain and pray no one finds the body. Curiosity finds it anyway.
I do not think anyone’s life is perfect. There will always be some kind of heartache. What matters is whether we learn from the situation or build a second disaster on top of the first. How a person copes is the measure of their inner strength. The stories are not there to scold. They are there so a reader can stop thinking they are the only one in the room.
I was raised in Brooklyn. I studied criminology at John Jay. That combination does something to a writer. You start listening for motive. You watch what a person does when they believe they will not be caught. You notice the joke they tell to keep the room from going quiet. Humor is not the opposite of pain in my work. It is how the pain stays bearable long enough to be told.
Characters arrive in my head and I build them by watching people. Sometimes I borrow a name from someone I respect. The rest is invention braided with incident — fiction that knows what nonfiction costs.
If you take one thing from the books, take this: you are not alone in the struggle, even when the struggle is ugly. Someone else is living a version of it. The question I leave on the table is the same one Torn Lives asks in its opening breath. Do we judge people for their actions, or do we show compassion for their transgressions? I will not answer it for you. I will not let you skip it.