'I am a bad mother.' Every Christmas, this is what I think because the holiday season fills me with such anxiety. I'm sure that other mothers are happily baking cookies, decorating trees, and finding perfect gifts for everyone.

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was the globe that I now keep right beside my desk.

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.

My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.

I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn't used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England.

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!

I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.

Writing is very much an emotional process; it requires you to be very in touch with your feelings. That is the opposite of what you're taught as a medical doctor. We're supposed to be detached and logical. Maybe because I started off as a writer and then became a doctor, I'm able to integrate those two.