An Accidental Woman

Barbara Ruth Greenberg was born on August 9, 1945, in Newton, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, where she raised in a family of lawyers. Her mother died of breast cancer, when she was eight, it was the defining event of a childhood that was otherwise ordinary. She took piano lessons and flute lessons. She took ballroom dancing lessons. She went to summer camp through her fifteenth year (in Maine, which explains the setting of so many of her stories), then spent her sixteenth summer learning to type and to drive (two skills that have served her better than all of her other high school courses combined). In 1967, she earned a B.A. in psychology at Tufts University and an M.A. in sociology at Boston College in 1969. The motivation behind the M.A. was sheer greed. Her husband, Steve Delinsky, was just starting law school and they needed the money. Following graduate school, she was a researcher for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. After the birth of her first child, Andrew, she took a job as a photographer and reporter for the Belmont Herald newspaper, and later for the Boston Herald. She also filled her time doing volunteer work at hospitals, and serving on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and their Women's Cancer Advisory Board. Barbara's career in writing began in 1980, after having a pair of twins, Eric and Jeremy, when she read a newspaper article about romance fiction. She researched the field, read 40 to 50 category romances and sat down to begin her own. She found that her background in psychology was helpful in "planning the emotional entanglements of (her) characters," and claims that she has "pulled on virtually every aspect of (her) background and of (her) life experience in general (in her writing)." Barbara Delinsky is nothing if not prolific. Since 1980, she has written well over 80 novels, and shows no sign of slowing down. She began signing her novels as Billie Douglass and as Bonnie Drake, now she signs her novels with her married name: Barbara Delinsky. More than 20 million copies of her books are in print worldwide, translated into over a dozen foreign languages. From Romantic Times Magazine, she's received the Special Achievement Award (twice), the Reviewer's Choice Award and the Best Contemporary Romance Award. She's also received the Romance Writers of America Golden Medallion and Golden Leaf awards. In 1994, Barbara was diagnosed breast cancer, like her mother. But it had surgery and treatment. And in 2001 she published the non-fiction Uplift: Secrets From the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors. Now, the Delinsky family resides in Needham, Massachusetts, where Barbara's husband is a prominent local lawyer.