Marcia Talley

I don’t recommend getting breast cancer as a way of helping you decide what you want to be when you grow up, but for me, the diagnosis and subsequent mastectomy and chemotherapy were the wake-up call that helped convince me to abandon a grueling one-hour-each-way commute to a windowless office in Washington, D.C. for a job closer to home.  I had always wanted to be a novelist, and as I faced my own mortality I thought, if not now, when?  Twenty years later, I am the author of seven published mystery novels (whose heroine, Hannah Ives, is a breast cancer survivor), two collaborative novels (with twelve other women), and my award-winning short stories appear in more than a dozen collections.