I've had an eclectic career: I've been a journalist covering the aerospace beat, interviewing international figures such as physicist Freeman Dyson, astronaut Pete Conrad, and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov ... a writer for the United Nations, including ghost-writing for the Secretary-General ... a book critic for two major newspapers, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the St. Petersburg Times ... and a staff editor for publishers as prestigious as Oxford University Press, editing trade books in history, theater, and jazz.

The first money I ever made, though, was through winning an art contest at age eight: my folks made me bung that $25.00 first prize into a savings account when I wanted to blow it on candy and Nancy Drew mysteries.

Another passion is sailing. I've had the great pleasure of crewing on 19^th-century rigs, mostly schooners: the Pioneer (an 1885 schooner built in Marcus Hook, Penn.); and the Lettie Howard (an 1896 Gloucester fishing schooner). I've sailed on the square rigger H.M.S. Rose, later used as the ship in the Russell Crowe film Master and Commander. And I had my own little boat, a 22-foot pocket cruiser, which I rescued from the weeds on City Island, N.Y., and restored. Grieved when I had to give her up.

I grew up in the Carolinas (which I adore), in an old Southern family. Now I live in an 1881 "Old Law" tenement on New York City's Lower East Side: there's still a mezuzah on the door from when this neighborhood was home to Jewish families like the Marx Brothers. There's still no sink in the bathroom, but the place is seething with charm. Original stamped-tin ceiling and all. And I'm still in love with New York: you never get to the bottom of it.