Naomi Rand received her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She has been awarded a grant in fiction from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She writes a regular review column for the Boston Globe Sunday Book Review, and has written for Redbook, Parents, and Working Mother. Her short fiction and literary criticism have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She is the author of Baby Basics, a pregnancy guide from the What to Expect When You're Expecting foundation. She lives with her husband and two children in Montclair, New Jersey.

From a 2002 article in the Newark Star-Ledger

Late last summer, when Montclair author Naomi Rand embarked on a book tour to promote her first novel, The One That Got Away, she was fond of saying she had to move to New Jersey to get published. It made for an entertaining anecdote that found particular favor with New Jersey audiences.

Sept. 11 changed all that. Now, says Rand, who lived most of her life in New York, celebrating the advantages of life in New Jersey seems somehow disloyal.

"I went back to Brooklyn for a reading after Sept. 11," she says. "It was so odd. You knew you weren't there, but you felt close. But when you go back, you realize close is not the same thing as there."

The attack not only prompted the cancellation of a number of Rand's promotional appearances, it changed their tone. "It comes up in everything you do," she says.

It also forced her "to examine its impact" on the Brooklyn-set novel she's now writing about the murder of an abortion doctor. "It changed the entire book," she says. "I started at page one again."

Whether or not the 47-year-old Rand's relocation to the Garden State still constitutes an engaging promotional yarn , the story is nonetheless true. As a New Yorker, Rand wrote 13 novels (two of them while getting her Ph.D.) and never got a one into print. Then, go figure, she moves here, writes a mystery set in New York City about a Brooklyn investigator, and HarperCollins publishes it -- something she believes would never have happened had she not moved to Montclair.

"Being here liberated me," says Rand. "I know that's not supposed to liberate you -- moving to the suburbs. But it psychologically freed me."

The reason, she says, is New Jerseyans. "They're much more open. Here, people are more willing to let down their guard and get to know you. And I was more willing to take advantage of people doing what they did. In New York, you're very loath to ask anyone for help. In moving away, I discovered you can't do things by yourself. You have to ask for advice . . . In a small town where getting to know people is easy, I made so many friends so quickly."

Whatever the reason -- small- pond advantage, perhaps -- the newcomer who "didn't know a soul" when she arrived soon found herself in welcome-wagon heaven. A former Rutgers law student of her sister invited her to join a local writers' group. She sold her first magazine article to Redbook. She was awarded a fiction grant ("my first really big break") from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. And she met the agent (her seventh) who would change her novelist status from would-be to published.

"I had written mostly character-driven, midlife books, where not enough happened," she says. "The way I write is kind of gritty but not elegant. You need a hook if you're not an amazing writer. I'm competent but not literary in the way that makes people go 'omigod!'"

She found her "hook" in Emma Price, the protagonist in The One That Got Away, Emma is a 40-year-old former investigator who, upon discovering she's pregnant just as her husband has announced he's leaving her, goes back to work. In a story that is both character-driven and complex, she discovers a link between the case she's assigned and the recent murder of her son's sitter.

"I wanted to write about a woman in a situation as honestly as I could and invest her with as many negatives and positives as I have in myself," Rand explains.

Rand managed to sandwich writing into her duties as a wife and mother (her children are now 9 and 13) and commuting to her fulltime job teaching English at Long Island University. Four- and-a-half years -- and "many, many drafts" -- later, she had a finished novel that HarperCollins liked well enough to encourage her to turn into a series.

After six years in an eight-bedroom Victorian her family loves, Rand readily thinks of Montclair as "home."

"I have an office that looks out on gardens I spend half my life working on," she says. "This is the kind of house I always wanted to live in."

And yet, confides the former New Yorker, "I still sometimes flinch when I hear my son say he's from New Jersey."