I’m a writer living in Greenwich Village. Just like the legends of old: Henry James, Jack Kerouac and Patricia Highsmith. Kidding! I’m a different kind of writer and the Village is a very different place than in their day.

 

But some things are eternal, like the joy of living your dream. I moved to New York City from California for college. Every weekend, my friends and I would subway down 100 blocks from Barnard College to the Village. We’d visit dive bars and wave clove cigarettes around while striking up conversations with hip strangers with whom we discussed existentialism (based, embarrassingly, on books we’d read just for this purpose). This was the era of Tama Janowitz, Basquiat and Desperately Seeking Susan. Personally, I was Desperately Seeking Myself. And I found her, or at least who I wanted her to be, south of 14th Street.

 

After graduation, I decided the Village is where I had to live. It was still affordable back then, especially if you didn’t mind cooking Thanksgiving dinner in a toaster oven.

 

But really, the action—and inspiration—were outside anyway. The city was vivid and dynamic —the perfect subject for a wannabe writer. I got a job as a production assistant at a local news station. I did little editorial work at first, but soon they started letting me write. 

 

A couple of years later, I got my first real TV news writing job, at the brand-new, 24-hour, NY1 News. They plopped me on the 3am-11am shift and those hours prompted my only brush with depression. It sucked but hey, I reasoned, it was another “writer” box checked. After all, the great Village poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay had suffered depression, too. Although she and written beautifully about it, while I just wanted to nap.

 

Edna famously lived in the narrowest house in Greenwich Village, just 9 ½ feet wide. I walked by it all the time. The romance of townhouse living captivated me and eventually I found an apartment in one. At the interview with the co-op board, I learned that decades before, a previous tenant of the building was the illustrious postmodern writer, Donald Barthelme.

 

The apartment sat a few doors down from a bird store. The store eventually went out of business, and was replaced by The Magnolia Bakery. A few years later, a little show called Sex and the City would air an episode in which Carrie and Miranda ate cupcakes on a bench outside and I would witness, in real time, as the Village experienced a paroxysm of change as rents and tour busses skyrocketed. 

 

For me, the next stop was Good Morning America, where I wrote segments and pre-interviewed guests. I was lucky enough to interview some of the country’s greatest writers. The more I talked to authors, the more I wanted to be one. Somewhere between Stephen King, Pat Conroy and Amy Tan, I decided I’d try to write a book of my own.

 

My first novel, The Ghost of Greenwich Village (Ballantine/Random House), was inspired by my time at GMA, as well as the Barthelme connection. I invented a cranky Beat Generation ghost—called Donald, of course—who haunts my protagonist, Eve, who writes for a network morning show. Donald complains bitterly that Eve is working “for the idiot box” when she could be taking dictation of his short stories. She tries to explain that life in the Village can no longer be financed by writing experimental fiction. They annoy each other for 341 pages.

 

The book got some nice reviews. The one that surprised me most was when The Ghost of Greenwich Village was selected by Katie Holmes in O Magazine as one of the five books that “changed her life.”

 

It changed mine, too. I knew I needed to write another book. Happily, by this time, I’d achieved my dream of writing for a primetime news magazine, Dateline NBC, and my real storytelling education began. Crafting two-hour mysteries, with cliffhangers at every commercial break, takes chops and I benefited from watching the best in the business do it. My tiny piece of the puzzle is writing opens for the show, the 90 seconds at the top of the broadcast that give you an idea what’s coming up. And, hopefully, make you cancel your dinner plans so you can watch.

 

Every year, I take a breather from murder, when I’m lucky enough to script NBC’s buzzy, star-studded New Year’s Eve “Toast” show, hosted by Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager. And I’ve been incredibly fortunate to collaborate on some powerful documentaries with, among others, Steven Spielberg, including “Auschwitz,” which was narrated by Meryl Streep and competed at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

 

Other projects have allowed me write for a diverse set of narrators, including Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford and Morgan Freeman.

 

Okay, sorry for the name dropping. Need to look forward, not backward, right? Time to leash up my dog, Kismet, and go for a walk around the most storied neighborhood in the world, looking for inspiration. Kerouac might be shocked at the changes since his time, including the pink cupcake wrappers that line our streets like cherry blossoms. But still, I hope he’d agree: there’s nothing like being a Village writer.