The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she has also received a Lannan Award in Literature and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first novel, Typical American, was short-listed for a National Book Critics' Circle Award and featured in a PBS special on the American Novel. She has subsequently published a collection of stories and three novels, the most recent of which is World and Town (Knopf, October 2010).

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children.