West Roxbury, MA c. 2000

Advice to authors: Right up there with “write what you know” is “write what you like.”

I beg to differ. The long version follows.

Throughout this season of winter storms, I’m often asked (by those who apparently don’t know me very well), “Aren’t you glad you’re not still back there?”  Meaning, I suppose, in Boston, where I was born or in New York City, where I went to school.

So, I’m answering the question as publicly as I can. No, I’m not glad I’m where it can hit 80 degrees in February.

I don’t like the Bay Area. There, I’ve said it. I don’t hate it. I just don’t like it.

But it’s much more interesting for me as an author to write the opposite. When I set The Oxygen Murder in my favorite city, New York, I made sure that my protagonist, Gloria Lamerino, hated it. It was fun to try to get inside the head of someone who was bored by Broadway and counted the minutes till her friend would let her leave the Met—more fun than using tour book phrases to describe the “spectacular shows” or the “breathtaking exhibits.”

In my next release (April 2015), I send Gerry Porter (the Miniature Mysteries) to New York. She can’t wait to get home I also try to give my protagonists markedly different temperaments from mine, and different interests.

Gerry, for example, loves the Bay Area. Although she’s an east coaster like me, she’s come to love California life; she gardens and she eats outdoors—not me; my record is clean on both. Gerry knows the names of the trees that line her street (I have to do research among my friends to write these passages). Gerry lives in an Eichler neighborhood like one not far from me in Castro Valley, and she loves her atrium. Wheresaas, an atrium is one of my top three things to rule out when I’m house shopping. Excuse me? Voluntarily buying dirt and bug potential for inside my house? I don’t think so. Atriums are up there with koi ponds and mold in the walls.

To enjoy the San Francisco Bay Area, you have to be basically an outdoors person. You have to love the sun, walk on trails, and, usually, have a pet or two. Again, my record is clean on all three. I lived on Lake Chabot Road for three years before I realized there actually was a Lake Chabot on the road. It’s pretty big, too, they tell me, and there’s a park, but—in my defense—most of its shore (do lakes have shores?) is blocked by trees of some kind.

Gerry never rails against her town of Lincoln Point, a fictitious city perilously close to Mountain View, California—whereas I’m constantly yammering about the state of museums in the Bay Area, compared to the Smithsonian, the Whitney, and the Frick, and wishing I were back at the Met, where I’m a member. San Francisco museums are all about the buildings and the grounds; New York museums are about the exhibits inside, and you don’t need to stand in line for a special ticket so you can spend 20 minutes in a tiny, crowded gallery to see 18 Monets. New York insurance buildings have more than that in their lobbies.

See what I mean about yammering?