Welcome
I am thrilled with the news that my new book, The House That Held Everything, A Family's Hidden Hoarding and the Secrets Left Behind (link), will arrive wherever books are sold in November 2025 (published by Bloomsbury Publishing). This is an unusual first-person memoir, inspired by the inherited childhood home of my deceased cousin, a home I had visited and enjoyed in the past, but something shocking had happened within its walls. When my sister and I opened the front door, we faced rooms filled wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with piled up items, many sealed boxes of Christmas ornaments, 10 years of unopened mail, stacks of cartons of unknown content, and more, all from years of secret hoarding. What had made this happen? I delved into every item to find out. In my year of separating significant items from garbage, I became determined to peel apart and expose the emotional underpinnings of hoarding, make sense of the difference between collecting and hoarding, become aware of the human side of holding on. I also discovered family secrets, a result of nothing thrown out. My year took me from repulsion at the sight of the hoarding to compassion for what made the hoarding happen.
I am also the author of five other books: The Dream Worlds of Pregnancy, and with Niels Lauersen M.D., Ph.D., four widely-read books on women's health: Listen To Your Body, A Gynecologist Answers Women's Most Intimate Question; PMS: Premenstrual Syndrome & You; You're In Charge, A Teenage Girl's Guide To Sex and Her Body; The Complete Book of Breast Care. My first memoir, the e-book Running on Two Different Tracks, transports you, my reader, through New York, Italy and Lithuania, where the shape of my family becomes transformed, first by a disappearance, and then by a child who became my daughter. (link)