About Nancy

I’m a native Californian, born in Inglewood, California. I didn’t spend my childhood in California though. My father was killed in an accident when I was a baby and my mother moved my brother, sister, and me to Royal Oak, Michigan. When I was eight she remarried and we moved back to the San Diego area. My education in writing began as a teenager living as a Navy brat Japan where a lifelong habit of correspondence was ingrained.

I was an indifferent student, preferring to read or go to Tokyo, explore, and work for a modeling agency. In 1968 when graduation time rolled around, I lacked the grades and enough attendance days to graduate. My mother, who was something of a shrinking violet, put on her Jackie O sheath dress, pillbox hat and white gloves and went down to talk to the school counselor. I don’t know what she said, but I was allowed to graduate.

I chose hitchhiking to India over going to college. Ten months of traveling—where I kept a fastidious journal (that was lost!)—solidified my love of observation, reading, and writing. When I returned from India it was the summer of 1969 and the first man was walking on the moon but I helped manage a pension, a 150-year old pirate’s house, in Ibiza, Spain. After that I lived two and a half years in Switzerland where I continued to travel and work. It was the worst job I ever had—as an animal caretaker in a pharmaceutical company, a job I still cannot bring myself to describe in writing.

I returned to the States at age 21, having been gone for six years. I began a fifteen-year career in fashion design. My designs were created out of recycled jeans, embroidered tablecloths, bedspreads, and anything I could scavenge in flea markets, thrift shops, and swap meets that met my criteria of being pleasing to the eye, tactile, and comfortable on the skin. For ten of those years I worked as a stylist and costume designer on TV commercials in Hollywood and then went on to create my own line of felt appliquéd Christmas stockings that were featured items in the Christmas catalogues of major departments stores such as Neimans, Thalhimers, and Saks Fifth Avenue.

In 1989, I was accepted to the University of California in Santa Barbara, where I maintained a 4.0 GPA . . . but when an English composition class rekindled my desire to write I dropped out to write a novel. It was an early version of Karma. The manuscript garnered considerable attention both in the publishing world and in Hollywood but the public wasn’t ready for a story on sex trafficking. My interest in health and cooking led me to team up with several doctors to write books on diet, adrenal burnout, Chinese medicine, culminating in my sole authored book Death by Supermarket: The Fattening, Dumbing Down, and Poisoning of America. My health books have sold over 650,000 copies, and I’ve established a voice in the real food movement, something that I’m proud of, as I love helping people be healthier.

Throughout my nonfiction career I never forgot the story about sexual slavery and continued to read and research the subject, which I consider one of the most important social problems in the world today. The finished novel, Karma, is the product of my research into the subjects of sexual slavery, Hinduism, and the true meaning of karma.

My current projects include Hippie Chick a memoir of my trip to India in 1968-69 and the novel Love Children, the story of a failed New York artist who falls in love with a wealthy married woman who he meets again 27 years after they committed a crime together.

Besides writing, my interests include Buddhist Metta meditation, reading, piano, yoga, hiking, cooking, entertaining, traveling, sewing, knitting, crocheting, interior design, and our whippets Charlotte Brontë and India. I live with my husband, John Davis, in an 1868 row house in the historic South End of Boston, Massachusetts.

My motto is the Sanskrit Om Shanti Shanti, which translates Past, Present, Future, Peace, Peace.