One of her friends passed it along to an editor at Dell who invited Wood to his office where he proceeded to, as Wood recalls, “ream me up one side and down the other, telling me in every way my book was lousy and I was a fool. I was heartbroken.” Baffled, Wood went home, made some minor cuts, and eventually an acquaintance at the Cancer Society recommended her to Mary Yost’s literary agency. They agreed to represent her and, after going out to five or six publishers, The Killing Gift landed at Putnam where Ned Leavitt bought it for $2500. He rolled up his sleeves and worked the manuscript hard with Wood and when it came out in hardcover in 1975 it surpassed Putnam’s expectations, staying on Newsday’s bestseller list for weeks and selling its paperback rights to Signet for $300,000.

Wood needed a second novel and she’d been discussing the 1975 deaths of the Marcus brothers with her colleague at Drug Therapy, Jack Geasland. The Marcus brothers were twin gynecologists who’d been found dead of drug overdoses in their shared apartment after a history of bizarre behavior at New York Hospital (including one of them tearing the anesthetic mask off a patient’s face during surgery and using it on himself). Wood pitched the novel to Putnam and they paid her and Geasland a $40,000 advance.

Twins (1977) did okay business in hardcover but cleaned up in paperback, spending ten weeks on the bestseller list, and was adapted into Dead Ringers (1988) by David Cronenberg.

“They had to buy it for the idea, that was the only reason,” Wood recalls. “I don’t think Cronenberg had much interest or respect for the book, but I met him and he was the sweetest man you’d ever want to meet.”

For her next novel, Wood remembered the production of The Golem she’d seen at St. Mark’s Playhouse, but her biggest influence turned out to be the New York State tax law. Recent changes in the tax code meant that writers were suddenly considered unincorporated businesses and Wood, who had made a large amount of money in a short period of time, found herself paying state and city income tax, then state and city corporate tax, then Federal income tax on top of that.

“I was so sorry I had to move to Connecticut,” she says. “There were no streetlights, no people, and while I lived there for many years, I can’t say I ever really liked it.”

Even worse, “When I left New York, a lot of the impetus was just gone. You could take a walk at lunch hour in New York and see so much stuff, and in Connecticut you took a walk at lunch and saw squirrels, and leaves, and chipmunks, and who cares? It hurt my writing.”

Wood finished The Tribe after settling in Connecticut, but she’s not a fan of the book.