Amy Bloom Books in Order

If you want a tour of her fiction: Love Invents Us → Away → Lucky Us → I'll Be Right Here
If you want historical fiction: Away → Lucky Us → White Houses
If you want short stories: Come to Me → A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You → Where the God of Love Hangs Out → Rowing to Eden
If you want nonfiction: Normal → In Love
If you want the mystery: Blunt Instrument

Amy Bloom was born in New York in 1953 and grew up in Great Neck on Long Island. In her family, writing was not some dreamy, mysterious calling. Both of her parents were journalists, so words were part of the household and writing was treated like real work.

She studied theater and political science, tried acting, and then took a different road. After marrying and having children, she earned a master's in social work and spent about a decade working as a psychotherapist. That clinical background never made her books feel clinical, but it did give her a close interest in how people talk, lie, protect themselves, and love badly and well.

Writing didn't arrive through a tidy plan.

Bloom has said she originally wrote mysteries, but a short story came to her and changed the direction of her work. She began writing seriously in her mid-thirties, while raising children and working, often late at night after the house settled down. The early break came fast: her first published story later landed in The Best American Short Stories, and not long after that her fiction was appearing in places like The New Yorker.

Her first collection, Come to Me, became a finalist for the National Book Award. A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You later became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Readers who come to her short fiction usually stay for the sharp dialogue, the emotional mess, the dark humor, and the sense that nobody in the room is simple, even when they wish they were.

Her novels travel farther in time and place, but they keep that same closeness to character. Love Invents Us is a bruised coming-of-age novel about a lonely Long Island girl trying to be loved. Away follows Lillian Leyb from a pogrom to New York, Seattle, and Alaska in search of the daughter she thinks may still be alive. Lucky Us turns two half sisters loose in 1940s America, while White Houses imagines the long relationship between Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt from Hick's point of view.

Love, sex, reinvention, family trouble, and found family are her usual weather.

Bloom has also moved easily between forms. Normal looks at sex and gender through reported portraits rather than fiction, and In Love is her memoir about her husband Brian Ameche's Alzheimer's diagnosis and the decision they made together at the end of his life. She has written essays and magazine pieces, created the television series State of Mind, and kept returning to the kinds of people who do not fit simple boxes but still want ordinary things: safety, pleasure, loyalty, a little peace.

She lives in Connecticut and recently retired from Wesleyan University, where she was the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing. She continues to work as a psychotherapist and a novelist. That mix helps explain the range of the books, from intimate short stories to historical novels to memoir and, more recently, mystery. She started out writing mysteries, after all, so in a way the circle has closed.