I'm a cultural historian, psychotherapist, and writer.

Much of my writing begins with something that seems intensely personal: a strange symptom, an inconvenient obsession, or some surprisingly big feelings about a certain neighbor and his flagrantly unbagged dog turds. But in the process of retraining as a psychologist, I discovered that many of the experiences I had taken as evidence of my own horrifying singularity were, in fact, alarmingly common. I began to suspect that what looked like an inconvenient obsession was usually psychoanalytic theory in disguise, and what felt like private suffering was often historical evidence of a social order that asks people to experience collective problems as personal failures. I've been holding that (unbagged) evidence up for public inspection ever since in essays and reporting published in The Nation, Psyche, Dwell, and elsewhere.

I'm working on a book, The Inheritance Complex, about what happens when the things we blame ourselves for turn out to be responses to a world that is increasingly difficult to inhabit. At its center is a simple question: what happens when we stop asking, "What's wrong with me?" and start asking, "What am I being asked to carry?"

I trained as a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, where I earned a PhD in cultural history before leaving academia as a new mother caring for a terminally ill parent. I found myself searching for a life in which intellectual work and ordinary human dependency didn't feel so fundamentally at odds. That search eventually led me into clinical work.

For the past four years, I've worked with individuals and couples in community mental health while training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I am completing a doctorate in clinical psychology at The Wright Institute (a decision that could reasonably be interpreted as a repetition compulsion). My research explores perimenopause as a developmental transition and investigates what happens when a way of life organized around caring for others becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. I'll complete my predoctoral residency at Access Institute in San Francisco in 2026–27.

I grew up between Athens, Georgia and a farm in rural Missouri. I now live with my family in Berkeley, California, where I have become extremely well versed in the somatic experience of stepping on a Lego.