READMYHIPS
Oh all RIGHT. But just remember, you asked for it.
found locked in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with pen-in-hand and a notebook balanced on my knees. Writing was how I played. I guess I was a tad antisocial.
By eighth grade I tossed off solitude and completed my first book-length manuscript with my best friend Charlene. We co-authored a novel called “Of Crime and Passion”. We wrote it in graffiti-covered spiral notebooks that we passed back and forth between classes in the hallways of Vance Junior High School. The two main characters were a female team of private investigators. They wore a lot of red and pink leather. The plot revolved around an endangered British pop band that bore a curious resemblance to Duran Duran.
A few years ago I started writing personal essays and found I got a huge kick out of writing from life. As more and more essays got published I realized: hey. People actually like reading this stuff!
Probably my nost noteworthy essay to date is one that detailed an informal social experiment I executed in New York City. Maybe you heard about it. I created a realistic-looking (but toally bogus) self-help book cover with the title "Fat is Contagious: How Sitting Next to a Fat Person Can Make YOU Fat", wrapped it around a real book, and "read" it on public buses. I wanted to see how people would react to a big ol' buxom gal like me, reading a book like that. Then I wrote about the experience. You may have seen me talking about it on The Today Show, or heard me telling my story on NPR.
"Read My Hips" is my very first published book. It's coming in 2011 from Crown Archetype, a brand new Random House imprint. I wrote it when I was working as a patent prosecution legal assistant, in a cramped office kitchen in midtown Manhattan, on a second-hand laptop I bought on eBay, on my lunch hour -- one 45-minute chunk at a time. (Yes, it can be done!)
Even though writing is my first and greatest love, I've done some other fun things over the years.
In the early 1990s I started a service called Dial-a-Poet in Philadelphia. D-A-P allowed 
anyone in the greater Philadelphia area to dial a local phone number and hear a recording of a different poem every week. All poetry was composed by local writers.
After moving from Philly to New York, I published a magazine called Cafe Eighties. It started out as a photocopied 'zine I stapled together on my apartment floor, and ended a nationally distributed glossy. For Cafe Eighties I hunted down and interviewed New Wave celebrities from the '80s, like Adam Ant, A Flock of Seagulls, Missing Persons, etc. Cafe Eighties is probably best known for its revealing interview with John Taylor of Duran Duran, conducted almost entirely with fortune cookies.
These days I live in a funky lil' oceanfront community 90 minutes outside of New York City, where I intend to write many more books on my upstairs porch. Of course, I can’t do the same thing all the time, so I'll continue to break things up by designing and sewing my own clothes, making videos, trolling around flea markets and performing in plays and spoken word events. I love ideas too much to ever stop putting them into action, so count on a few more special projects, too.
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