Her maternal grandmother was born and raised in Chisinau, Bessarabia. Barbara's reviews, essays and articles have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, Ms., the Los Angeles Times, People, Yahoo and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has been interviewed on numerous radio programs, including WNYC's Soundcheck and KOED's Forum. It took Barbara ten years and thirteen drafts to write her first novel, Northern Edge. The book won the Discover: Great New Writers Prize when ti was published in cloth by Donald I. Fine in 1990. There were jacket quotes from Ursula LeGuin and Jessica Mitford. The novel was brought out in paperback by HarperCollinsWest in 1995 and optioned for a film in 2007. Barbara was afeatured speaker shortly after the books publication at Literary Women: The Long Beach Festival of Authors. Barbara wrote two pop psychology books over the course of the same number of years (Still Friends: Living Happily Ever After. Even If Your Marriage Falls Apart, from Wildcat Canyon Books, and Under Her Wing: The Mentors Who Changed Our Lives, published by New Harbinger. In 2005, with co-author Matthew McKay, PhD, she wrote The Commitment Dialogues (McGraw-Hill, later translated into Spanish) and teamed up with artist Liz McGrath to write the bilingual children's picture book, Even More/Todavía Más (Raven Tree Books).