My Heroes

1) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who literally saved my sanity. I was much younger then and less resilient and I detested Nixon and his cohorts with a white-hot, diamond-hard hatred. Please, don't get me started.

2) Charles Darwin whose ideas made sense out of the universe.

3) Joseph Campbell, mythologist extraordinaire. When I was sick for four months with Lyme Disease I spent many hours on our couch, watching my husband's tapes of Bill Moyers interviewing him. I emerged from the Lyme Disease coma a different person and Joseph Campbell's ideas about humanity and our common experiences provided the foundation.

4) DH Lawrence, who told the truth about our souls, minds, bodies, and what links them together. And I can't resist writing this one last time: he wrote the best anti-war and anti-establishment novel in the history of writing. Lady Chatterley's Lover was not a novel about sex.

5) JS Bach who wrote Prelude in C Major, my favorite piece of music. I wrote about this in my short story "Music Hath Charms."

6) William Shakespeare who wrote among others, Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing.