I used to write what I call “sensitive male stories” for women’s magazines like Glamour and Harpers Bazaar. Stories like “The Night She Dumped Me” or “Remembering What’s Her Name.” In between I wrote at Saturday Night Live, The National Lampoon and the New Yorker.

Then I had this idea for a sitcom Clarissa Explains It All about a fourteen-year-old girl who talks to the camera and is cooler and smarter than everybody and explains everything with charts and graphs. But no one believed a girl could lead a sitcom in those days. That was way back in the 90s. Girls started dressing like Clarissa and it made Melissa Joan Hart a star and a household name. Women (and a lot of men) now in their twenties and thirties grew up with Clarissa and still love it.

Around that time I came up with the idea for a novel about a girl who gets through her crummy life by obsessively watching Audrey Hepburn movies. I’m intrigued by how people, like Lisbeth in the novel, struggle to find their passion and how Audrey Hepburn fits into it all that as an aspirational icon and guide.

I have been published in The New Yorker, The National Lampoon, New York Press, Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar. I was a writer for Saturday Night Live and the creator of Clarissa Explains It All, as well as the executive head writer on Ren and Stimpy, Rugrats, and Doug.

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