Psychology expertise helps authors


Roberta Isleib, Ph.D., a Connecticut psychologist, recently celebrated the publication of her second novel, A Buried Lie. (photo by Kathryn Hardy)

By Meredith Fine

Roberta Isleib, Ph.D., a Connecticut psychologist, didn't play golf and never imagined she would be a published mystery writer.

All that changed when she met her future husband in 1990. "He was a golfer, I was not," says Isleib. "But when it's early on, you'll try anything. Then I got hooked.

"I was a terrible golfer. I was not at all natural and very stubborn. People said, 'For God's sake, take a lesson.' I went through eight professionals."

She decided that she was qualified to write about how women should choose a golf teacher or about the psychology of golf. She pitched her ideas to magazines and was rejected at every turn.

Isleib, like a handful of other New England psychologists, began to feel that fiction could be a better medium for her message. For Isleib and another well-known New England fiction writer, Donald Davidoff, Ph.D., mysteries were a natural extension of their professional lives. For Florence Ladd, Ph.D., fiction allowed her to show a world largely hidden from view, her own world of middle-class African-American women.

In May, Isleib celebrated the publication of her second novel in the Cassandra Burdett series, "A Buried Lie." Her first book, "Six Strokes Under," was published last year. A third is planned for next April, followed by two more.

Isleib has loved mysteries since her childhood in New Jersey, when she read Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Cherry Ames and Agatha Christie, among others.

She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in French literature from Princeton, a master's degree in vocational rehabilitation counseling from the University of Tennessee and a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Florida. After serving an internship at Yale, she settled in Connecticut and, in 1987, opened her own practice. Soon afterward, she got married.

After deciding to try her hand at fiction, Isleib invented Cassie Burdett, an aspiring professional golfer and amateur detective who requires the assistance of a psychologist to deal with a bagful of personal problems.

"Being a psychotherapist is like being a detective," she says. "People have suffered some kind of trauma and you don't know the source."

Twenty-eight publishers rejected the book before Berkeley Prime Crime bought it.

"You have to be persistent, be willing to be knocked down and get back up," she says.

Like Isleib, Davidoff did not plan to write fiction. A native of Brooklyn, Davidoff received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from City College of New York and earned a master's degree in biomedical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, he took a psychology course at Harvard. He also became a fan of mysteries, reading 45 Nero Wolfe novels in one month.

"I got fascinated by the brain," he says.

He received a doctorate in clinical psychology from City University of New York, and joined the staff at McLean Hospital, where he runs the dementia unit and manages the hospital's testing services.

Among his many activities, Davidoff works as a forensic neuropsychologist, helping to defend accused murderers who often don't have the means to hire specialists.

"These individuals most often were in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong brain. In 20 years, I've seen three really true psychopaths. The others really have something profoundly wrong in the brain," he says.

Over the years, he and his wife remained close friends with a former teaching assistant and his wife. At dinner one night in 1996, Davidoff and his friend's wife, Hallie Ephron, decided to write a mystery together.

Ephron is from a famous writing family but she herself had not written. With her daughter going off to college and Davidoff's rich experiences, the time was right.

"This light bulb lit up in the middle of the table," he says.

Their three books to date are titled "Amnesia," "Addiction" and "Delusion."

Davidoff says, "We do exactly what Hallie's parents did: I will talk, she will take notes. I'm pretty good with plot and character, and Hallie will begin to make that into a story.

"My greatest fear was that she was going to make me sit down and write, and her greatest fear is that I'd want to write. We have no overlapping skills. The synergy is much greater than the sum of its parts," he says.

The main character, Dr. Peter Zak, bears a striking resemblance to Davidoff and he works in a facility that bears a striking resemblance to McLean. At first, Davidoff avoided mentioning the mysteries at work, but eventually, he told the administrators.

"The hospital has been nothing but supportive, it has blown me away," he says, noting that McLean has even hosted a book signing.

He warns his colleagues, "Anything you say can and may be used against you in the novel."

As with Isleib, the genre felt comfortable for Davidoff. "I look at the individual as a puzzle. That's what engineering - and mystery writing, and neuropsychology - is all about," he says.

Ladd, a resident of Cambridge, Mass. became an award-winning fiction writer following a long career as a teacher and college administrator.

She graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a Bachelor of Science degree, and received a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Rochester in 1958. She has been a top administrator at Wellesley College, MIT and Radcliffe College. Earlier, she taught psychology at Simmons College and was an associate professor in city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is a former associate executive director of Oxfam and was its liaison to the United Nations. She has written on subjects such as housing, feminism and peace.

A trip to Senegal in the 1980s opened a new path. She met a woman who declined to be interviewed as a case study. "She refused with the rationale that what I imagined about her life was much more interesting than the day-to-day details," says Ladd. "The word 'imagine' gripped me. That was the moment of fictional impulse that changed my life."

In a 1997 speech Ladd presented to a literary conference at Harvard, she said, "While my psychology publications afforded considerable satisfaction, nothing else in my professional life has been as satisfying and affirming as the appearance of my novel."

"Sarah's Psalm" chronicles the life of an African-American woman during the civil rights movement. The book won the best fiction prize in 1997 from the American Library Association's Black Caucus. Actor Tim Reid bought a film option.

"Sarah's Psalm" had a relatively easy ride through the publishing cycle. "I had good luck with that manuscript," she says. "It didn't have to be shopped around."

Since then, her work has stalled. "I wrote a sequel that Scribner's declined," she says. "That was so depressing, I started doing aerobics." She has continued to work on a novel, two nonfiction books and poems.

All three authors say their experiences with psychology are central to their writing, in shaping characters and developing plots.

Isleib makes one more point about the profession. "If you go to a movie, the psychologist is either crazy or sleeping with a patient or completely ineffective. There are not too many models of good psychologists, 'The Sopranos' aside. I have Cassie in therapy, and it's told from her point of view, how painful therapy can be, but how it can really help. We're not all either useless or unethical."

Psychology expertise helps authors (June 2003 Issue)

Psychology expertise helps authors
(June 2003 Issue)