Amy Bourret

Amy Bourret combined work as an attorney with fiction whose legal career and child-advocacy work informed her attention to family responsibility. Mothers and Other Liars, her debut novel, follows Ruby Leander, who finds an abandoned baby and raises the child as her daughter. Years later, evidence about the girl’s origins forces Ruby to confront the consequences of the decision that created their family. The book appeared from St. Martin’s Griffin in 2010, setting its psychological and domestic conflict largely in Santa Fe. Bourret graduated from Yale Law School, became a partner in a national law firm, and performed pro bono work for child-advocacy organizations before turning more fully to fiction. Those experiences give the novel’s ethical questions practical weight without turning it into a courtroom story. Mothers and Other Liars introduces Amy Bourret as a writer concerned with love, secrecy, and competing obligations, asking what parenthood means when devotion grows from an act that cannot remain hidden.