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"...she has a gift for vivid and inventive descriptions and a clear affection for and understanding of her characters..."
-Booklist (April 2010)
Preview an excerpt.
Visit the Summer Shift page.
Washashore: someone who lives on Cape Cod
but was not born here...
Okay, so maybe we should define the word “born.” Because I may have technically entered this world in a hospital in Teaneck, NJ, but life didn’t really begin for me until I landed on Cape Cod. It was here that I met my first boyfriend, crashed my first car, threw up my first three (or ten) rum and Cokes. It was here that my father lost his 7-year battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and where my mother had to make a new life for herself. It was here where I learned hard lessons about life, and leaving one’s childhood behind. And after high school, like any restless teen, it was here I couldn’t wait to leave.
So I set out to seek fame and fortune, or at least to acquire some sort of formal education (a BA in journalism at UMass), find love, become an advertising copywriter, which I was able to do as a freelancer once my son was born. Now tethered to a family, our journey took us to Boston and New York, with us eventually landing in South Florida, where we baked for ten years. One could say it was really here that I began to write seriously, obtaining a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Florida International University, though I could argue that the poems and stories I developed here had actually been percolating inside me since those early years.
Yet through all this business of living my life and raising our child, I was still haunted by the Cape. I returned to visit my mother, sister and friends as often as I could, coming up for winter holidays, renting cottages in the summer, poring over real estate ads and thinking…someday. I missed the smells and the light and the people, the local color. I missed a good r-less New England accent, small town politics, the occasional tree-splitting N’oreaster, the seniors who barely see over their steering wheels (okay, Florida has them too). I missed the chowder and steamers, the pubs that served them, and townies who frequented them, their trucks festooned with fishing poles and “Piping plover tastes like chicken” bumper stickers out in the parking lots. 
I envied the people who, unlike myself, had made the decision to stay. I became slightly morose, a writer in exile, just like my Cuban brethren back in Florida. I had things to say about the place from which I’d hailed. (No, not Teaneck). I became obsessed with all things Cape Cod.
I wrote most of my first Cape novel, Some Assembly Required, while living in Florida. And when we finally had the chance to move back to New England, we jumped, settling just outside of Cambridge, MA.
Fast forward over a few bumpy years to the present, where (ta da!) I am now living on Cape Cod year round for the first time since I was eighteen years old. A husband shed, though a friendship maintained, a child grown up and off at college, here I sit in the company of my devoted pooch who goes by my maiden name, Kiele, at a desk overlooking a shell driveway and tangle of trees beyond. This modest, grey-shingled house I call home has a footprint almost identical to the house no more than three miles down the road where I spent my teenage years. My wish has finally come true, and unlike so many wishes that seem great until they are actually realized, I am really happy here, a prodigal daughter returned. I am a Cape Codder, and in my heart of hearts, know I have been one all along.
A beach read pick for Woman's Day
and The New York Post!
