I’m a writer based in Brooklyn, and I recently finished my first novel, The Expectant.
about me
From 2022-2023, I gave birth to a son, Roe vs. Wade was overturned, I got pregnant with a daughter (born Spring 2024), and I wrote the novel I’ve been thinking about since Hillary Clinton lost the election.
I am now seeking representation for THE EXPECTANT, upmarket fiction loosely inspired by GREAT EXPECTATIONS that explores the struggles and progress women experienced as daughters, mothers, lovers, caregivers and workers over the course of the 20th-century in New York.While readers of DEMON COPPERHEAD and JAMES will be drawn to this reexamination of beloved source material, THE EXPECTANT is neither a remapping nor a reckoning, but rather a reimagined story that aims to vividly portray the great expectations these female characters hold for their lives—both fulfilled and impossible.
I hold an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, and I received support for this novel during the 2023-2024 Novel Generator Workshop taught by Lynn Steger Strong (WANT, FLIGHT). By day, I work for The New York Times as a Director of Strategy.
THE EXPECTANT: A BRIEF SYNOPSIS
By the time Stella and Pip meet on the doorstep of Amelia Decatur's dilapidated Brooklyn mansion in 1963, their young lives have already been shaped by both the unwritten rules of society and the women who birthed and raised them. Stella was born to Bette, a teenage orphan who escaped to New York to pursue a career in acting until the unplanned arrival of her daughter, and whose attempt to regain her career brings tragic consequences in the pre-Roe era. Stella also spent her early childhood with Dot, Bette’s roommate who strives for success in the male-dominated world of the American Theater while wrestling with her sexuality. Dot’s fateful decision to pursue the work she loves over anything else changes the course of every character’s life in THE EXPECTANT.
Pip was adopted as a baby by his hardworking and brilliant older sister Jo, who pushes him towards greatness even as she resents his existence—ultimately landing him on the battlefield of Vietnam. Pip and Stella’s friendship grows in the fits and starts of adolescence, the tumult of the 1960s, and in the shadow of the odd, reclusive, and occasionally cruel Amelia, who has never recovered from the abandonment by her suffragette mother.
Propelled by these women’s choices and constraints, Pip comes to question what it means to be a great man, while Stella sets herself on a course to escape Amelia and pursue her passions, while ultimately finding her way back to Dot, the mysterious and successful woman she remembers from her childhood.