Plan B Nation, def: Where we are, not nec­es­sar­ily where we planned to be.

Who am I? My name is Amy Gut­man. A card-carrying mem­ber of Plan B Nation, I’m a lawyer and writer with eclec­tic inter­ests and a resume to match.

In pre­vi­ous lives, I worked as a news­pa­per reporter, designed and co-founded the Mis­sis­sippi Teacher Corps, prac­ticed law in Man­hat­tan, wrote two sus­pense nov­els, and served as pri­mary speech­writer for Har­vard Law School Dean (now U.S. Supreme Court Jus­tice) Elena Kagan.

In 2009, after my boss decamped for Wash­ing­ton, D.C., I found myself job hunt­ing at the peak of the the Great Reces­sion, along with mil­lions of other abruptly unem­ployed work­ers. Over the fol­low­ing months, I grew increas­ingly fas­ci­nated by how we all were coping–and fail­ing to cope–with our new and often chal­leng­ing lives. The result: This blog and a book-in-progress.

An hon­ors grad­u­ate of Har­vard Col­lege and Har­vard Law School, my writ­ing has appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tri­bune, Salon, and the Hufff­in­g­ton Post, among other pub­li­ca­tions. My two nov­els, Equiv­o­cal Death and The Anniver­sary were both pub­lished by Lit­tle, Brown.

I live in west­ern Mass­a­chu­setts and work every­where.