Francine du Plessix-Gray

It's the birthday of Francine du Plessix-Gray (books by this author), born in Warsaw, Poland (1930). She got a late start writing fiction. She was married with two children, she kept a journal, and it kept getting bigger. She said that one day when she was 33, after she cooked and entertained a group of weekend guests, she "felt an immense void ... the deepest loneliness I'd ever known." She wept for hours, took out a notebook, and started rewriting one of the three stories that had won her a prize when she was in college. Twelve years later, it had become the first chapter of Lovers and Tyrants (1976), her first novel.