Commitments

9 August 1945

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 …