McAFEE, Carol 1955-

PERSONAL: Born April 11, 1955, in Baltimore, MD; daughter of John G. (a radiologist) and Joan M. (Weber) McAfee; married Ralph L. Arnsdorf (an attorney), August 24, 1979; children: Kaitlyn Leah, Julia Joan. Education: Attended Middlebury College, 1973-75; Cornell University, B.A. (cum laude), 1978; University of California at Davis, J.D., 1981.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o Ralph Arnsdorf, 100 Light St., 6th Fl., Baltimore, MD 21202. Agent—Claire Smith, Harold Ober & Associates, 425 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10021.

CAREER: Writer. Attorney, admitted to the State Bars of California, 1981, and Maryland, 1987.

MEMBER: Maryland State Bar Association, California State Bar Association.

WRITINGS:

The Climbing Tree (adult), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Who's the Kid around Here, Anyway? (young adult), Fawcett (New York, NY), 1991.

Walk among Birches, (psychological fiction), Sourcebooks (Naperville, IL), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Letters to My Father, a completed young adult novel; Mistrial and The Finder, completed adult novels.

SIDELIGHTS: In Who's the Kid around Here, Anyway?, Carol McAfee details the effects of a mother's alcoholism on her entire family. For sixteen-year-old Maddy Winchurch, it means too much responsibility in managing the household as well as the fear of letting any friends get close enough to discover the family secret. When her father leaves the family, Maddy rebels, getting involved with the wrong crowd and experimenting with alcohol and marijuana. Eventually Maddy learns to ask for help, and the entire family gets some assistance as well. The emotions of dealing with an alcoholic in the family, including "the depression Maddy feels about her out-of-control life," as Voice of Youth Advocates contributor Bonnie Kunzel described it, "are nicely depicted." Sherri F. Ginsberg noted in Kliatt that the book successfully shows "a teenager realistically mishandling her own troubles," and added that McAfee is "sensitive . . . without being didactic." "In briskly moving prose, McAfee entwines truth with fiction," a Publisher Weekly writer commented; the result is a heroine "readers will root for."

Walk among Birches is a novel based on McAfee's personal experience with postpartum depression. The protagonist, Janey Nichols, suffers severe depression following the stillbirth of her son, an experience that brings up suppressed memories of her little brother's childhood death and her mother's alcoholism. In her first-person narrative, Janey admits she is seriously considering suicide and is subsequently hospitalized. Here, she befriends Delphina, a flamboyant patient, an addict in an abusive relationship who, according to Joanne Wilkinson in Booklist is a "funny, larger-than-life black woman." Crippled by her depression, Janey struggles through a long course of psychotherapy. Still far from recovery, she returns home to her husband (whom she suspects of having an affair with one of her colleagues) and their nine-year-old daughter, believing she has let them both down. It is only through her efforts to help Delphina escape her abuser that she begins to see that her life is not so bad, and the depression begins to lift. While Wilkinson commented that McAfee's novel does not adequately handle the issue of postpartum depression, it does effectively evoke a "feel for setting." A critic for Kirkus Reviews commented that "predictable healing epiphanies . . . come too easily in a story that strains to be profound and moving." However, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that, although the novel starts slowly, it contains "some genuinely moving scenes" and that the book makes the "unexpectedly provocative suggestion . . . that some depression may be self-inflicted."

"I've wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl," McAfee commented. "I first wrote a play in third grade which the teacher liked and asked the class to perform. I've been 'hooked' since then. I wrote for the high school newspaper, penned literary and theater criticism in college and wrote movie reviews during law school. I wrote book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle and all the while I kept working on being a writer. I returned 'home' to Baltimore in 1984 and published my first novel, The Climbing Tree. I continue to work on adult suspense novels and young adult books. The key is that I'm always writing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 15, 1989, p. 1253; Joanne Wilkinson, review of Walk among Birches, p. 1922.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1989, p. 337; July 15, 2002, review of Walk among Birches p. 983.

Kliatt, November, 1992, pp. 9-10. Publishers Weekly, March 10, 1989, p. 78; June 22, 1992, p. 64; September 30,2002, review of Walk among Birches, p. 249.

Voice of Youth Advocates, December, 1992, p. 283.*