Turning From Law to Writing, Michelle Lerner ’93 Publishes First Novel

Michelle Lerner ’93 knows that it can be hard to make a career transition later in life. Yet with the publication of her debut novel, Ring, this month, the former public interest lawyer says others shouldn’t wait to do the work they want to do.

Lerner began her writing career before arriving at Princeton — she acquired her first mentor, the poet Laura Boss, when she was 16. She then took poetry writing classes at Princeton with Paul Muldoon and Julie Agoos, and she was the editor of Voices, a women’s literary magazine. “What I had always actually wanted to do was be a writer, it just didn’t feel like a practical pursuit as a career,” she says.

Instead, inspired by student activism at the Women’s Center and against the first Iraq War, she decided to go to law school to work on the causes she cared about. As a public interest lawyer, she worked in impact litigation around disability rights, poverty, language access, environmental law, and animal protection law.

“The whole time I was a lawyer, I felt like it was temporary, but I never seemed able to extricate myself from it,” Lerner says, adding that she really believed in the work she was doing even though she didn’t like the job. “The more skills and experience I had, it became more and more difficult to just decide to stop doing it. I think this happens to a lot of people who are in careers that are maybe not what they think is their ideal career: You get more and more entrenched.”

She continued to submit poems to journals, and many were published. Then, as she continued to work full-time as a lawyer, she went back to school and graduated with an MFA in poetry the year of her 15th reunion. “But even then, I could not get myself to actually leave law,” she says.

Lerner finally was forced to step away from her legal work in the spring of 2016 when she was diagnosed with Neurological Lyme Disease after years of undiagnosed medical issues. She was bedridden for a year and a half, and when she was well enough to start working again, she turned to writing.

Image

“I wanted to write something very realistic about depression and about grief,” Lerner says of the novel she began writing in 2019. Ring is about a person struggling with complicated grief after losing their adult child, and their journey to a sanctuary designed to help those who are dying. “While that sounds extremely heavy and dark, I’ve been told that the book is very psychologically uplifting and helpful and a page turner,” she says. “Honestly … I laughed the first time that I was told that.”

She is now working on her second book: “a creative nonfiction sort of memoir” about  animals she has cared for, including a neurologically impaired squirrel and a physically disabled sheep. She also continues to write poetry, and she has no plans to go back to practicing law.

“I think part of what I learned is I can do this, and if I had really had the wherewithal and given myself permission earlier, I could have done it earlier also,” Lerner says of her career transition. “I’m not sorry I did any of it. ...  I’m glad that I had the experience of doing the work that I did, and that I get to also have this second career focusing on what I wanted to focus on from the beginning.”