Susan Rieger was edu­cat­ed at Mount Holyoke Col­lege and Colum­bia Law School. She was a res­i­den­tial col­lege dean at Yale and an asso­ciate provost at Colum­bia, and she has taught law to under­grad­u­ates at Mount Holyoke, Hamp­shire, Colum­bia, and Yale. She has writ­ten fre­quent­ly about the law, her arti­cles appear­ing in pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing the Berk­shire Eagle, the Hart­ford Courant, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times. This is her first nov­el. She lives with her hus­band, the New York­er crit­ic David Den­by, in New York.