 Her physicist father's professional pursuits kept the family constantly on the move during her childhood, and she attended a large number of schools, public and private, before graduating from the George School in Newtown, PA, in 1975.She enrolled in the University of Wisconsin–Madison and earned a bachelor's degree in linguistics in 1980; she studied medicine for a year but found medical studies unfulfilling and left to begin a family.She is a mother of four.