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Psychologist and author Ellen Kirschman is open about the fact that she has a few things in common with the protagonist of her Dot Meyerhoff Mysteries book series, including giving the fictional sleuth names from her family.
But beyond that, her own life story could be fit for a novel, springing from her training as a dancer to working as a modeling school teacher, a probation officer, a police psychologist and now mystery author. In addition to her fiction books and some short stories, Kirschman has also penned several nonfiction titles in her work as a psychologist.
Born and raised in New York, she has lived in Redwood City off and on since 1967, including for the last 24 years.
Kirschman began writing the Dot Meyerhoff series a little more than a decade ago. “Call Me Carmela,” the fifth book in the Meyerhoff series, published Nov. 26. Ahead of the book’s publication, Kirschman sat down with us to talk about her diverse career, her love of storytelling and her book series.
Long before Dot Meyerhoff came into being, Kirschman started her professional life pursuing dance, the field for which she earned a degree at Adelphi University in New York. But her future career was already in the mix: she minored in psychology.
She moved to the Bay Area and began working at the John Robert Powers modeling agency, teaching classes in visual poise. Kirschman said that the modeling profession could pose a challenge to students’ body image and mental health. She not only voiced her concerns, but also took a psychology class to better support her students’ mental wellbeing.
“I’ve always been interested in how people tick. I enrolled myself in a class with a very famous psychologist by the name of Eric Berne. He wrote ‘Games People Play,'” Kirschman said.
Several women in her class happened to be probation officers, and they encouraged her to try their line of work. She made the leap to working for a time as a probation officer in Oakland, but ultimately, she said, it was “not for me.”
“I decided to go back to school and get my master’s in social work at (University of California) Berkeley, and then I went to work at Kaiser, right here in Redwood City. That’s when some police wives started coming in to see me and telling me what was going on,” Kirschman said, noting at the time, most police officers were men.
“What I would say — as you were taught to say — was ‘perhaps ask your husband to come and join you here,’ and not only would the husbands never come, but pretty soon, the wives would drop out of therapy, too,” she said.
Kirschman approached Cañada College administrators about offering a class to help police spouses gain a better understanding of the job and its stresses. The class was called “I Love a Cop,” and Kirschman said she knew she had “struck a need” when the class was not only filled, but it also had 40 students on the waiting list. Soon after, she began receiving invitations to come speak to other classes.
Seven years later, Kirschman decided to pursue her doctorate in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley.
“I’d like to say my dissertation was a combination of Sigmund Freud and Mickey Spillane. It was an intensive case study, so I looked at three cops who hired on as healthy people and went out on stress-related disability,” Kirschman said. She interviewed everyone, from the officers themselves to their spouses and exes, supervisors, even worker’s compensation investigators — aiming to put together a picture of what happened. It became a foundation for her work as a clinician that has taken her to 22 different states and four countries. She went on to write a nonfiction book on the subject, borrowing the name of that first class she offered years before at Cañada College: “I Love a Cop.” That book is now in its third edition. Kirschman went on to write the book “I Love a Firefighter” and she co-wrote “Counseling Cops” with two retired officers.
“We wrote the books we wanted to read,” she said, noting that the books focused on stories and used accessible language, rather than writing them in a more academic style.
“My nonfiction books are filled with stories of real people. I’m interested in people’s stories. That’s partly why I became a psychologist,” she said.
Eventually, Kirschman turned her focus to writing fiction. “I was delusional, and I thought it’d be easier to make this stuff up,” she joked, saying that at the time, she believed writing fiction would be easier than putting so much time into research and fact-checking.
“Even when you write narrative nonfiction — meaning it has a novel-like quality to it — it’s still like writing 24 term papers and putting them together. And the reader can say, ‘well, I’m interested in this chapter, but that doesn’t apply to me.’ But when we’re reading fiction, most of us want to be swept away by the story. I like teaching myself new things so I really had to learn the craft of doing that,” she said.
It was Kirschman’s penchant for storytelling that helped bring Dot Meyerhoff to life, building on her many experiences. She called the character after mother’s first name, Dot, and her maternal grandmother’s last name, Meyerhoff.
“I’ve always been a reader — not necessarily of mystery, just of everything. And I thought, ‘wow, some of the things that I’ve seen that have happened to me would make great stories, and I could make my central figure a police psychologist,'” she recalled.
Kirschman has now written five books featuring Dot Meyerhoff. The fictional psychologist and amateur detective has learned some things about her second calling — and about love — as the series portraying her has progressed.
“In the beginning, she did get herself in situations that were physically dangerous. As she has matured in the book, she’s using her brains much more than anything else,” Kirschman said, noting that in the early in the series, Dot was also recovering from a divorce and was reluctant to pursue another relationship, but has found her way to romance again.
Though Kirschman draws some inspiration from cases she’s worked on, she changes numerous details for her books. More than anything, she takes on big-picture topics that she’s encountered in her work. The first Dot Meyerhoff book, “Burying Ben,” tackles the subject of police officers dying by suicide. Kirschman said she wanted to highlight that cops are twice as likely to die by suicide as to be killed in the line of duty. Her second book in the series, “The Right Wrong Thing,” explores the struggles and hostility that a young female rookie faces in a male-dominated workplace. The officer is shocked to find the dynamic with co-workers has flipped after she shoots a suspect.
Stories in the news have also sparked Kirschman’s inspiration, as with her most recent book, “Call Me Carmela.” The story that inspired the book took place in England and concerned a young woman who seeks out her birth parents after learning she’s adopted. She discovers some dark news about her birth father, but finds that her birth mother doesn’t want to hold him accountable for what he’s done. In the book, the young woman is the goddaughter of one of Dot’s closest friends. Dot promises to help her find her birth parents and her investigations lead her into the shadowy world of illegal adoptions.
“There are so many conflicts. Imagine that she finally finds her mother, and the mother doesn’t want to help and wants it all to go away,” Kirschman said.
“This book is not as cop-oriented as the other books. There are cops in it,” she added.
Since the character of Dot isn’t a cop, Kirschman said she sometimes will give Dot a personal connection to a case to provide a premise for her investigation. That level of personal involvement — and Dot’s lack of work-life balance — are not things she’s borrowed from her own life.
But there’s one aspect of the books that Kirschman said that she’s almost copied from real life: borrowing from her husband, S. Hollis Johnson, to create the character of Dot’s love interest, a photographer named Frank. So how does he feel about being immortalized in print?
“He likes it because he’s a really good guy in the book, just like he is in real life,” she said.
“Call Me Carmela” and the other books in the Dot Meyerhoff series are available at major online retailers. For more information, visit ellenkirschman.com/fiction.
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