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My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics.

I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

My mother was a children's librarian, and I was raised on lots of English children's literature. It gave me this weird idea that I was English.

My second novel began after my family moved from New York City to North Carolina, and I watched my son walk into kindergarten at a school in which he was the only Jewish child out of 600 students - and this in the middle of the Bible Belt.

My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships.

I studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine.