He fell in love with books at a young age, and though he studied English literature at the University of Notre Dame, he always retained his fascination with young adult novels, especially fantasy and adventure stories. After teaching high school English in Brooklyn, New York, and Vienna, Austria, he went to law school and entered private practice in Chicago, where he occasionally also teaches legal writing and writes articles about constitutional law and legal history. Confessions of a Dangerous Girl is his first novel.