As a writer, I depend on my agent and my editors to help me polish my prose. But before my work’s ready enough to give to them, I first count on writer friends. I have three great ones—one is good with psychology, one knows structure, and one I happily pay to do a genius developmental edit. But sometimes, when I am feeling most insecure, I ask other writers for help, and that insecurity, I realized, has driven me to writers who, well, who are very much like my mother and sister were in wanting to tell me who I am.

I loved my mother and sister. I truly did, but they both could be inconsistently loving and then cruel. I lived for both their approvals, and at first there was no cost. My mom immediately took a 3AM flight out of Boston to New York when my loved one had died. She showed up, too, when I was mysteriously, critically ill in a hospital to lovingly tend to me, my husband, and our brand-new baby. Any time I even hinted at unhappiness, my mom was at the ready to pick me up from disaster, make me laugh, and shower me with kindness. My sister, too, was my heroine, when I was growing up. I was homely and gangly and miserable, but my beautiful sister took me under her wing, taking me on dates with her and her boyfriend, helping me to iron my curls straight, even getting me into Cambridge’s hipster clubs I was too young to attend. Of course, I adored her, and she adored me right back.

Success, though, was a different story and that was where the loving family faucet turned tightly off. When in my twenties, I published my first novel to........

© Psychology Today