Elayne grew up on the Northside of Chicago. She went to university and graduate school in the Midwest―Ohio State University and the University of Michigan where she earned a Masters of Public Health and then a PhD in Psychology. She lived in Barbados, West Indies, working as a health care consultant with Project Hope in the Caribbean; then, several decades later, returning as a writer and columnist for the Barbados Daily Nation. Her professional career has largely been in academia at San Jose State University, with her research and clinical area of expertise being the severely mentally ill. A recent transplant to the Santa Ynez Valley, near Santa Barbara, she is a popular lifestyle newspaper columnist there. Elayne has also appeared on San Francisco public television as a restaurant critic. She’s been awarded several writer’s residencies, including Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony on Whidbey Island, Washington and Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California. She daily walks her young dachshund and aged fluffy white rescue through nearby vineyards. She is married to David, a scientist. Between them have five children, all grown.

The Earthquake Child is the story of an adoption, told through the voices of an adoptee, his desperate young birth mother, and his loving but grieving adoptive mother.

How can Joshua’s behavior be explained? This question is all-consuming for his adoptive family. Joshua was relinquished at birth, then adopted only days later. Is it his genetic inheritance of substance abuse and generational poverty that causes him to [[what? What is the “behavior” referred to above? Say something about it here]]act out, run away and eventually become involved with drugs? Is it the losses he’s experienced in his adoptive family? Or is it the very fact of adoption itself—the trauma of being amputated from his gestational mother to be raised by a family unrelated to him by blood, culture, or biology?

What makes our children who they are? These voices and questions will resonate with all parents, but particularly with those who are or have been part of the adoption triangle: adoptees, mothers who have relinquished a child, and parents who’ve added a child to their family through adoption.

Who is it we love and why do we love these people? Toward the end of her life, Judith asks these questions, trying to understand why she chose Elliot Pine to love. Why, for sixty years, did she persist in loving someone who never gave as much as he was given? In her quest for understanding, she writes her story to this exceptional man. Meeting as children in Chicago, they move to opposite coasts. Elliot embarks on a remarkable legal career in Washington and New York while Judith raises her children alone in California, after tragedy. Coming together again and again throughout their lives, their love is never equal, Elliot defining the terms of the relationship.

Judith examines the role of Beauty in love, for Elliot’s face and form were beautiful. She considers the role of Consolation, how they supported one another in devastating times. Insanity, Magic, Deceit, Sensory Fulfillment, and, finally, Being Seen―Judith looks at these many aspects of her love.
Her feelings for this man cost her, impinged on every other relationship in her life: friends, her two husbands, even her three children. After sixty years, however, it all changes. Judith makes one more profound sacrifice, finally achieving a sort of long-awaited happiness in her love.