I have nine books, one husband, two kids, one dog, and seven brothers and sisters. I'm the bestselling author of the novels, Wallflower in Bloom, Best Staged Plans, Seven Year Switch, The Wildwater Walking Club, Summer Blowout, Life's a Beach, Multiple Choice, Ready to Fall, and Must Love Dogs, which became a Warner Bros. movie starring Diane Lane and John Cusack.

After decades of procrastination, I wrote my first novel in my minivan outside my daughter's swim practice at five in the morning. It was published when I was 45, and at 50 I walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of the adaptation of my second novel. Midlife rocks! I love telling my story, because I think so many women (and a few good men!) have buried dreams like mine. My advice: dust them off and go for it!

A former teacher of physical fitness, including dance aerobics and open ocean rowing, as well as creative writing, I also wrote advertising copy for a now defunct shoe company (not my fault!) and worked as continuity director of a radio station. I live in Scituate, Massachusetts with my husband and dog, and text often with my two adult children. I've been a judge for the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Family Circle magazine fiction contest, and I’ve taught master classes for The Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, Cape Cod Writers Center, and Evening@Emory.

I love speaking to groups, and teaching reinvention workshops for women coming into their own at midlife. I love writing novels and feel incredibly lucky to get to do it for a living -- this is the career I almost didn't have!

What’s your buried dream?

(the long version...)

I write because I can. I'd love to be a musician or a painter, but writing is the place where my urge to create and my ability intersect. I think we all have that place. For some, the trick is finding it. For others, it's all about having the courage to live the dream.

I've known I was a writer since I was three. My mother entered me in a contest to name the Fizzies whale, and I won in my age group. It's quite possible that mine was the only entry in my age group, since "Cutie Fizz" was enough to win my family a six-month supply of Fizzies tablets (root beer was the best flavor) and a half dozen turquoise plastic mugs with removable handles.

At six I had my first story on the Little People's Page in the Sunday paper (about Hot Dog, the family dachshund, even though we had a beagle at the time -- the first clue that I'd be a novelist and not a journalist) and at sixteen I had my first front page feature in the local weekly. I majored in film and creative writing in college, and fully expected that the day after graduation, I would go into labor and a brilliant novel would emerge, fully formed, like giving birth.

It didn't happen. I guess I knew how to write, but not what to write. Looking back, I can see that I had to live my life so I'd have something to write about, and if I could give my younger self some good advice, it would be not to beat myself up for the next couple of decades.

But I did. At the same time, I pretended I wasn't feeling terrible about not writing a novel, and did a lot of other creative things. I wrote shoe ads for an in house advertising agency for five weeks, became continuity director of a local radio station for a couple of years, taught aerobics and did some choreography, helped a friend with landscape design, wrote a few freelance magazine pieces, took some more detours. Eventually, I had two children and followed them to school as a teacher, where I taught everything from multicultural games and dance to open ocean rowing to creative writing.

Years later, when I was in my forties and sitting in my minivan outside my daughter's swim practice at 5 AM, it hit me that I might live my whole life without ever once going after my dream of writing a novel. So, for the next six months I wrote a rough draft in the pool parking lot, and it sold to the first publisher who asked to read it.

My first novel was published when I was forty-five. At fifty, I walked the red carpet at the Hollywood premiere of the movie version of my second novel, Must Love Dogs. I'm now the bestselling author of nine novels, including my newest, Wallflower in Bloom. Not many days go by that I don’t take a deep breath and remind myself that this is the career I almost didn't have.