Author Bio
Buffy and Kate met the first day of Sarah Lawrence College. Kate, who hailed from Long Island, was wearing all black (as she had since junior high). Buffy, from the D.C. suburbs of Maryland, was wearing a yellow mini sundress and a floppy pastel hat. Buffy thought Kate was a hippy-Beatnik type. Kate thought Buffy looked like one of Cinderella's mice (if some of them had been into surfing.) Kate had found her style early. Buffy had no real clothes having worn a school uniform for the last six years, but in no time, she came to wear mostly black. Kate loved the Beatles; Buffy loved Motown. We hit it off immediately, creating a kind of us-against-they World of Two. We did everything together: ate together, teased boys together, took Classical Greek together, wrote papers together, and stayed up all night together trying to puzzle out the Vast Mysteries of the Universe as college students have been doing since Charlemagne founded the first university. Senior year of college, Buffy got together with Peter, a Sarah Lawrence man (no, he was not one of the ones we had teased). And Peter, from the start, was kind enough and smart enough to allow Buffy regular disappearances back into the World of Two with Kate.
Buffy started as a secretary at Harper's Bazaar the Monday after her Friday graduation and nine months later was at Paramount Pictures. Kate got a job with a small children's publisher in the South Bronx (Fort Apache! Gang warfare! Wild dogs!) and met her future husband on the #2 subway. Kate lived in the West Village in an apartment later made famous as the apartment building for "Friends". She introduced Buffy to Chumley's, The White Horse Tavern and more black clothes.
As we both moved steadily up our respective corporate ladders, we had this need to keep alive our best college habits: reading great books, writing, and trying to puzzle out the Vast Mysteries. We formed a Writing Group of Two and met every week over lunch -usually at a Japanese restaurant that fit our budgets—to go over the exercises we had assigned each other. The exercises were, for example, describe your hands in ten sentences or write three paragraphs about your commute. The exercises morphed into an idea for a novel and we got together most weekends to work on it. Golden Triple Time was published around the time that Buffy was made head of publicity at Paramount and Kate was giving birth to her son and starting a new children's book imprint at Dutton. We worked on a second collaboration (never published) when we were both pregnant with our second kids and Kate had gone to work at Random House and Buffy, still at Paramount, had become the first woman to be named head of Marketing at a major studio. At the same time, we were also both working on our first solo novels. We exchanged chapters, encouraged each other, made suggestions. Kate's Labor Pains, was published by Crown and Buffy's Creative Differences was published by Soho Press.
About the time our novels were published, Kate was named Editorial Director at Random House and Buffy moved to Los Angeles to be President of Marketing for Columbia Pictures. These were the Intense Career and Child-rearing years, during which time Kate had a third child and Buffy tried to adapt to Los Angeles and to being for the first time in twenty years without Kate.
This marked the start of Our Own Private Iowa, the virtual space we made for ourselves mid-way between the two coasts where we could meet to talk to death, by phone, by letter, and eventually by e-mail, nearly everything that was happening to each of us. What did we talk and laugh about and agonize over? Our kids (the triumphs, the white-knuckled crises), our careers (Buffy got the Silver Bullet and set up her own business as an independent producer of TV and movies and Kate stayed at Random House rising to publisher), and our personal lives (what there was of them in the time left to us). And every time we got together in person, our goal always was to figure out what the Next Collaboration would be.
Then, a few things happened in rapid succession: Buffy got her AARP card, Buffy's parents fell (but were not hurt) on Thanksgiving eve, Kate's mother got a sub-cranial aneurysm (and was quite badly hurt) and came to live in her dining room. Buffy called an Emergency Session in Our Own Private Iowa and said to Kate, "We've got to figure out this getting old thing now." Neither of us ever dreamed we would wind up writing non-fiction. But Coming of Age…All Over Again arose directly out of our life experience and our need to find a way to navigate through maturing careers, kids leaving the nest (or failing to), parents needing help, our bodies and minds and spirits needing therapy and solace. Kate inspires Buffy and Buffy inspires Kate and together we were determined to plan mindfully and intelligently for the second half of our lives. Coming of Age is a celebration of our lives, of our families, of our friends and of our writing collaboration, but mostly it is a celebration of our almost—okay we'll say it- forty year friendship!
Favorite Books by the authors of Coming of Age…All Over Again
Buffy read a lot as a kid. She lived in the country and was not allowed to watch television on school nights so she found herself with a lot of time to read books. She would check out a stack from the small, two-room country library near her house. She was also influenced by what her older sister, Gogo, was reading. Almost four years apart, that age difference means nothing as adults but as kids, it meant Buffy was reading at 9 what her sister was reading at 13.
Young girl/early teens: mysteries, classics, long romantic novels
Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
Nancy Drew Series
Kirkland Revels, Victoria Holt
Tomorrow is Forever, Gwen Bristow
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Kate was a voracious reader. Surrounded by books in her home, she chose with total freedom (both Kate's and Buffy's parents never censored what they read). She loved fantasy and books with magical themes and she and her girlhood best friend, Justine, read the books together and often many times over.
Young girl/early teens:
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
Curdy and the Princess, George MacDonald
The Five Children and It, E. Nesbi
Half Magic, Edward Eager
The Magus, John Fowles
The Collector, John Fowles
The college years: Kate and Buffy plunged headlong into women's fiction. Where had these books been hiding?
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
In My Mother's House, Colette
The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
Diaries of Anais Nin
All things, Jane Austen
Middlemarch, George Eliot
A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Ann Porter
But of course we also read books by men:
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
Monsieur Teste, Paul Valery
Impossible Object, Nicholas Mosley
Dark is the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, Malcolm Lowry
The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow
Mr. Bridge, Mrs. Bridge, Evan Connell
And just after college, Buffy developed into a full-fledged Proustomaniac! Kate followed her, but only so far. Marcel might never have another fan as ardent as Buffy. She went to his grave and childhood home on her honeymoon.
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
Buffy is debating whether to reread Marcel's masterpiece in a new translation. Penguin, UK has charged seven different writers to translate each of the seven volumes. As adults we read books and write each other letters and later emails about them. Sometimes we are so excited we mail the book to each other so that over time our libraries have become a mix of Kate's and Buffy's books.
What I'm Going to Do, I Think, Larry Woiwode
The novels and short stories of Richard Ford
Monkeys, Susan Minot
The short stories of Lorrie Moore
Atonement, Ian McEwan
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
Endurance, Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing
Ursula, Under, Ingrid Hill
Case Histories, Kate Atkinson
Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Marquez
Kate and Buffy enjoy mysteries and thrillers and often read everything by certain authors. Such as: Michael Connelly, Anne Perry, Hanning Mankell, Elizabeth George and Patricia Highsmith