Photo credit: Sebastian Steiger
About
Welcome. I am a writer, child and adult psychiatrist in Berkeley, California, and former Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, my work reflects a fascination with how early experiences in life shape lives. How do people change over time; what about them stays constant? How far back in time would a person have to go to start over and change their destiny? This interest appears in my books, my articles in professional journals, research, and in a wartime memoir I facilitated. My latest work is the novel, The Boy Who Took Marilyn to the Prom.
New in 2021:
The Boy Who Took Marilyn to the Prom
Release date: Summer 2021
"...mesmerizing...grippingly strange, poignantly melancholic, and psychologically sophisticated." Kirkus Reviews
The Boy Who Took Marilyn to the Prom is a work of fiction. Two events inspired the book: Near the end of her life Marilyn Monroe’s last psychiatrist tried to save her from depression by welcoming her into his home to give her a family life which she had never had. The doctor’s 17-year-old son took Marilyn to his senior prom at Hollywood High School. The actress was 35, looking no older than a college coed. Years later, the son having become a prominent psychiatrist himself, encounters a patient who reminds him of the Marilyn. This rekindles his memory of what happened between him and the actress in the early morning hours after the dance, which drives him toward breaching the sexual boundary between patient and therapist.
