About The Dolphin Smiles

The novel is about women and medicine, sexuality and freedom, the healing power of eros and the liberation of the body to release trauma. Pamela is struggling in her triangle between the fiery and pragmatic Bruna, and the ethereal and enigmatic Martine, to answer the quintessential human questions: What is freedom? What is commitment? How does one both honor the past and at the same time disconnect from it?

I never say that the novel is about lesbians, and I recently got into a fight with a major book retailer who insisted on putting in under gay and lesbian studies. Yes, the women portrayed here all sleep with women, they are lesbians, but they are more importantly women involved in struggles and excitements whcih are universal. Major book chains don't get that.

I began the novel while I was a resident in psychiatry at Bellevue. I was drawn to sketches and fragments of people's stories, and also by a tremendous urge to use my own internal fantasy world to create a completely different psychic landscape from the harsh grid of the hospital. I tried as hard as I could to imagine myself into the lives of people who didn't exist, but who lived out and embodied the things I most feared and wanted.