Origin Stories:

Fiction Rooted in History, Deadly Little Secrets

When I was a young RN working in the clinical and teaching psych nursing, I had no intention of shifting careers. I liked what I did and did it well. I was also birthing babies during these years that this virus, its earliest versions called Gay Related Immune Disorder,GRID, was insinuating its way into our communities.

Fast forward to the late 80’s, Starsky & Hutch’s Paul Glaser and wife Elizabeth Glaser’s story made frontpage news across the country. Rather than allow the Inquirer to out her,she did.

Elizabeth Glaser’s memoir ‘In the Absence of Angels,’ published in 1991, haunted me when I first read it and still does. Elizabeth and I had baby girls, our first and born within months of each other, mine in Chicago and Elizabeth and Paul Michael Glaser‘s daughter Ariel in LA.

Elizabeth needed a blood transfusion at her baby’s birth and that blood was tainted. Except we didn’t know. She passed it on to her newborn through mother’s milk.

During the early years of this plague & beyond, I worked in the clinical and I was worried. We all were. We didn’t know much about this virus except it was deadly.

From that era I wrote ‘Deadly Little Secrets’ a novel set in 1985, weeks before Rock Hudson’s announcement put this plague in the world spotlight. ‘Deadly Little Secrets,’ narrated by a RN educator, is a medical suspense novel and includes several RNs, a few MDs and two teenage journalists-in-training.

That story turned into my first novel and is available in paperback.

Deadly Little Secrets: A Novel Rooted in Fact. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0991206770