About the Author

For an abundance of information about the professional side of my life, please visit www.reidwriting.com. I developed that web site for my business providing strategic communications services to non-profits. I am not currently pursuing the business, but the web site provides extensive information about my professional experience. For a more intimate glimpse into my background, you can read the brief essay below.

A Few Developmental Steps

I was born the third of four children of Marshall and Marian Reid, and was raised in Noblesville, Indiana, an old-fashioned county seat with about six thousand people and a big courthouse square in the middle of downtown. The courthouse was a scary-looking red-brick nineteenth century building with a jail on the first floor. You could see the jail bars right there, from the street. The courthouse lawn was fringed with petunias in the summer, and old men in straw hats sat on benches among the flowers and talked the afternoons away.

My dad was a mechanical engineer for Firestone Rubber Company, which had a large plant in Noblesville. He designed gaskets for caskets and other rubber products with (primarily) non-military applications. My mom was a school teacher until she had kids. She had majored in history and biology – history because she loved the human story, biology because she loved God. For both of my parents, science revealed the unfathomable mysteries of God's creation. Their education (both were graduates of the University of Wisconsin at Madison) informed their religious observance, which entailed being Sunday school teachers and adult Bible study group leaders and taking us four kids to every function (pancake breakfast, Christmas bazaar, choir practice, Christmas Eve midnight service, Easter sunrise service, Methodist Youth Fellowship, and so on) sponsored by Noblesville's First Methodist Church.

Every summer, my parents took us on long camping trips. When my baby brother was four years old they began taking us all the way out to Wyoming, tent camping every night on the road, to stay in the Jenny Lake campground in Teton National Park. I will never forget the sight of huge speckled trout swimming under the footbridge on Jenny Lake; or the sight of a rainbow arching over the glittering glacial lake in the canyon below us on one of our hikes. Every single Sunday of my life we went to church, preferably Methodist – even when we were camping, even when our clothes were soaked from torrential rains the night before, even when bears had somehow gotten into our breakfast.

As I grew up I eschewed both camping and organized religion, but not my love of nature and my reverence for the marvels of the visible and invisible worlds.

Although we were not at all wealthy, I was raised with the explicit belief that I was very, very lucky and morally bound to “give back” to the world that had given me so much. In my family (and largely in the culture at that time), for girls that meant going into teaching or social work. I did both, majoring (at the Ohio State University) in Psychology, Comparative Literature, and Women's Studies and then – after a few years working in a couple of different organizations with abused and neglected children (then termed “pre-delinquent” youth, as though all the fault lay with them) – I went back for my master's degree in English, and taught several different courses as I leisurely worked on my thesis, which was improbably entitled, “The relationship between epistemology and morality in three novels by Henry James: The Turn of the Screw , The Portrait of a Lady , and The Golden Bowl .” It was a ludicrously ambitious master's thesis, but, happily, good enough to get me a full academic scholarship at the University of Chicago, where I desperately wanted to study with my idol, Wayne Booth.

So I moved to Chicago, and got a couple of jobs to pay living expenses as I took courses toward my PhD. I did get to study with the magnificent Wayne Booth; but the English Department at the University of Chicago was, like many others at that time, convulsed with change, and I spent an inordinate amount of time reading Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes and other pretentious and opaque French philosophers. I still want that reading time back, as it was almost entirely wasted.

However, I was productive in other venues. For instance, I was working on my first book. Like so many first books, mine was born of bitter experience: I titled it Being Cheated On and Living to Tell the Tale: True Stories from Men and Women . Without too much trouble, I got fabulous agents who were confident that they would auction the book in a matter of weeks. Instead, they returned a couple of battered manuscripts nine months later. As one friend said, my first book died a horrible death on the streets of New York.

In the meantime, as I was finishing my coursework and studying for qualifying exams, my part-time job – as managing editor of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence – led me to take on the duties of the executive director for a fledgling organization called the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC).

APSAC had been founded a year or so before by some of the nation's leading lights in the field of child abuse and neglect – among them Charles Wilson, Jon Conte, Lucy Berliner, David Finkelhor, John Briere, Kee MacFarlane, Ken Lanning, and Bud Cramer – and soon, because of my admiration for these people, it began consuming more and more of my time, until I could do nothing else but work on APSAC. For a good long time, we had a real ball building APSAC from the ground up, and I knocked myself out.

Ten years after I began, I quit running APSAC to become Natalie's mother, and to finish my PhD at last (which I did in 2001). I was revising a proposal for another literary agent for a trade book based on my dissertation (which was entitled “An ethical analysis of discourse on child sexual abuse from 1850 to the present”) when we were called to Ukraine to find Lana.

And if you have read Two Little Girls , you know the rest.