I've always been obsessed about how people choose - or are destined - for the paths they take.

I've always been obsessed about how people choose - or are destined - for the paths they take.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

My parents came to this country after World War II, Jews from Czechoslovakia who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. They settled with my sister in rural Ohio in the 1950s, where my dad became the town doctor and I was born.

The biography I've written about Wendy Wasserstein will almost invariably be different than the one anyone else would write.