Nora Roberts was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, in October 1950.  She was the youngest of five children and the only girl in the family, a fact that would color many of the books she would write as an adult. 

Nora attended Catholic school for the first nine years of her education. The discipline instilled by pre-Vatican II nuns in the future writer is a humorous thread in many interviews, but it’s a thread based in truth for Nora.  “I joke about the nuns, but the fact is the discipline that they drummed into education stuck for me. You can have all the talent in the world but if you don’t have the discipline to sit down and write on a regular basis, you’re not going to write or publish any books.”

She married directly after graduating high school and settled into Keedysville, Maryland, a tiny town in the rolling hills of the western end of the state where she still lives today. She had a brief career in the field of law: “I could type fast but couldn’t spell!  I was the worst legal secretary ever.” 

Once her sons were born, Nora stayed home and tried her hand at every creative outlet she could find.  She sewed her boys’ clothes.  She macraméd a hammock.  She learned how to can fruits and vegetables.  She also picked up the habit of reading category romances which were a quick pleasure living with two active boys.

A blizzard in February 1979 led her to try another creative outlet.  She was snowed in at the top of a wooded hillside with two boys under the age of six and no four wheel drive vehicle to get down to town.  Kindergarten was canceled four days straight and there was a dwindling supply of chocolate in the house.

Reading was a family pleasure as Nora grew up – there was never a time that she wasn’t reading or making up stories.  During the blizzard (now a legend among her readers), Nora pulled out a pencil and notebook and began to write down one of those stories she had been carrying around. She had never tried writing other than school essays before, though storytelling was in her blood. “I did tell some really good lies, some of which my mother believed until she passed away.

But on those snowbound days, when she started telling stories to entertain, a career was born.  “I started writing as a way to save my sanity,” she says now, “and I fell into a job that I love.”

It wasn’t an overnight success.  Nora wrote six manuscripts that were rejected by Harlequin.  A new romance publisher took a chance on an unknown writer and her first book, Irish Thoroughbred, was published by Silhouette in 1981.  Today, that early promise seen by Silhouette has translated into more than 300 million copies of her books in print.

Since she started putting those stories down in notebooks, Nora has used discipline and talent in equal measure. Early in her career, she worked her writing in between her sons’ pre-school and nap schedules every day. When they were both in school full time, her writing schedule mirrored theirs, although she put in extra hours over the weekend. Now, after 193 books and countless bestsellers, she writes eight hours a day, five days a week.  She still adds in weekends if the work is cooking along.

Nora met her second husband, Bruce Wilder, when she hired him to build bookshelves.  They were married in July 1985.  Since that time, they’ve expanded their home, traveled the world and opened a bookstore.   Their current project is rehabbing an old hotel in Boonsboro, Maryland into Inn Boonsboro, a bed and breakfast with six suites.  Each one is themed after a couple in literature that had a happy ending, including Nora’s own Eve and Roarke from the JD Robb In Death series.

Through the years, Nora has always been surrounded by men.  With four brothers, two sons and a husband, she’s learned the workings of the male mind, to the constant delight to her readers.  It was, she’s been quoted as saying, a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming. 

Nora’s sons have married and settled near to that house on a hilltop in Western Maryland.  This means there’s some balance with two daughters-in-law and a granddaughter (who gave Nora the chance to purchase girl’s clothing with delight).  A grandson rounds out the close-knit family.

Nora is a charter member of the Romance Writers of America and a recipient of their Lifetime Achievement Award – renamed in 2008 as the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award.