I used to want to be a neurosurgeon. Growing up the daughter of two research scientists, I spent much of my childhood nestled in a small, safe corner of a laboratory, reading while my parents worked. When you are a kid and spending most of your weekends hanging out in a place with a hazmat suit hanging in the corner, you pretty much need to figure out non-fatal ways to amuse yourself. Me, I turned to books. I read a lot. In fact, I was the MS read-a-thon champion of my elementary school for three years running. As the top-prize winner, I got a watch that I wore for years, even after the face cracked during an unfortunate incident on the blacktop. But it wasn’t about the watch. I simply loved to read.
One summer during high school, I volunteered on the neurology ward of a hospital, where I observed brain surgery, read Jane Eyre during my lunch hour, and scribbled short stories in a black marbled composition book. That’s when I discovered I was more interested in probing human actions and reactions with a pen rather than a scalpel. Nevertheless, I matriculated at a university in California as a pre-med student, although I later graduated from a college in New York City with a degree in cultural anthropology. (How that happened, well, that’s another story, involving seismic shifts, a parrot named Pico, and spicy tuna sushi.)
I have pretty much been living in New York ever since and consider this city of “8 million stories” my home. I started writing because I couldn’t stop the words stitching themselves into sentences in my head. I continue writing because I enjoy the intellectual task of mastering a new subject, the creative challenge of conveying thought through word, and the emotional satisfaction of exchanging ideas with others. I hope I will always write, because I am hooked on language, with its unique power to open up never-ending vistas of both knowledge and imagination.
I confess: I am not only a lover of my own language, but of others as well. I have studied—for varying lengths of time—Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Latin, and Ancient Greek. I can listen to people speak in a foreign tongue for hours, even if I understand nary a word. It’s like listening to music. I have never met a language I didn’t like. I even used to get a kick out of hearing my dog bay—she was a Beagle—although I suspect my neighbors were not quite as enthusiastic.
The official version:
Stephanie Staal spent several years in the film and publishing industries as a literary scout before turning to writing as a career. After working as a features reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger, she wrote The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of Our Parents’ Divorce (Delacorte, 2000), a journalistic memoir about the long-term effects of parental divorce on her generation, and, more recently, Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life (PublicAffairs, 2011). Her articles and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Glamour, and Marie Claire, among other publications. A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she recently received her J.D. from Brooklyn Law School, where she was the recipient of a Prince scholarship, and has held legal internships at the Center for Reproductive Rights, Equality Now, and the law school’s asylum clinic, Safe Harbor Project. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
