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Debut Author Podcast: Leslie Schweitzer Miller

Much of what I’ve done in life hasn’t proceeded in the usual, expected way: I got married and had children before I attended The Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. My first residency was in pediatrics, then a second psychiatry, and ultimately psychoanalytic training. It has been and continues to be an enormously gratifying endeavor. Bearing witness to another human being’s life and watching them change is a rare privilege, and I love the relationships I have with the people in my care. It’s also been quite a detour, but even a detour eventually leads you back to your original destination.

Ultimately I came back to the pleasure of story-telling, and wrote Discovery. It is a novel about coming of age in middle age, a love story, an exploration of how the past colors the present and the capacity of people to change. The characters I created, and their lives, have become as real to me as any friend or neighbor. I know everything there is to know about them, much that remains unwritten, but helps, I hope, to make them people you can care about, who are psychologically sound and believable. It has been my intention to make fiction and factual research, perception and invention swirl together and blur on the pages. Learn more at http://www.lesliesmillerauthor.com/