McPhee, daughter of the esteemed literary journalist John McPhee, grew up outside Princeton, N.J., and now lives in Manhattan. Her parents divorced when she was 4. At the time, the McPhees were putting up the struggling screenwriter Bo Goldman and his family. Goldman later wrote 1982’s “Shoot the Moon,” a brutal divorce movie about a famed nonfiction writer. Gossip flew. McPhee considers the film fiction and insists seeing it wasn’t devastating: “Frankly, “Kramer vs. Kramer’ was much more disturbing to me.”
McPhee studied Italian literature and art history at Bowdoin. Later she attended Columbia grad school, worked for the international literary scout Maria Campbell and did odd jobs Campbell found for her–including a plum gig translating the pope’s “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” into English with her sister Jenny. Now McPhee’s in the throes of writing a second novel, though she admits, “Sometimes I’d rather be out in the world, running around Morocco with my husband.” But she’s too good to quit. Her husband, Mark Svenvold, is a poet. That makes two of them.
