Barbara Delinsky

Barbara Ruth Greenberg was born on August 9, 1945, in Newton, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, where she raised in a family of lawyers. Her mother died of breast cancer, when she was eight, it was the defining event of a childhood that was otherwise ordinary. She took piano lessons and flute lessons. She took ballroom dancing lessons. She went to summer camp through her fifteenth year (in Maine, which explains the setting of so many of her stories), then spent her sixteenth summer learning to type and to drive (two skills that have served her better than all of her other high school courses combined). In 1967, she earned a B.A. in psychology at Tufts University and an M.A. in sociology at Boston College in 1969. The motivation behind the M.A. was sheer greed. Her husband, Steve Delinsky, was just starting law school and they needed the money. Following graduate school, she was a researcher for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. After the birth of her first child, Andrew, she took a job as a photographer and reporter for the Belmont Herald newspaper, and later for the Boston Herald. She also filled her time doing volunteer work at hospitals, and serving on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and their Women's Cancer Advisory Board. Barbara's career in writing began in 1980, after having a…