Silver Water (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Amy Bloom was born in 1953. She spent her childhood in Great Neck, Long Island. According to the author, she started writing stories when she started reading, but she stopped when she was sixteen. At that time, she found it difficult to write about her life when she could not even understand it.

Bloom, however, maintained her lifelong fascination with other people’s stories, which perhaps explains the pull of the theater when she was younger. Bloom eventually attended graduate school and embarked upon a career as a psychotherapist. She later recalled that as she drove home after her first meeting with her training analyst, the urge to write suddenly resurfaced. By the time she reached her home, she had an entire plot for a story worked out.

Despite the interest in writing, Bloom continued to work full-time as a psychotherapist. Bloom has always been careful to completely maintain the privacy of her patients, however, and she has stated that she draws the material for her stories primarily from her own life and that of her friends and family.

Her short stories began to draw national attention in the early 1990s in such works as Antaeus and Story. Her work also appeared in The Best American Short Stories of both 1991 and 1992. In 1993, Bloom published the short story collection Come to Me. The book was a finalist that year for the National Book Award.

After her demonstrated success as a short-story writer, Bloom turned to longer works, and she published the novel Love Invents Us, excerpts of which originally appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker.

As Bloom’s literary reputation has grown, she has reduced her practice. Today, she continues to divide her time between her writing, her patients, and her family, with whom she resides in Connecticut.