Words, Well Chosen

How it all started…

I moved to Israel from London at 23, three months after the Yom Kippur War. More than five decades later, I am still here.

I fell into freelance writing in the mid-1970s, when my first job here, in editing, disappeared, and have been writing ever since. I’ve ghosted a dozen books and written for newspapers and magazines in Israel, Britain, Ireland and the United States. Hadassah Magazine, for which I’ve written since 1979 — principally about medicine, science and Israeli life — is my longest-standing outlet. Along the way, I’ve discovered that the things I find most interesting are usually the things that refuse to fit neatly into a category.

My first book, The Outsiders Who Built Irish Entertainment: Maurice and Louis Elliman, grew from a family history: my attempt to explain to my daughters how their great grandfather and his sons—Jewish immigrants from Russia—helped build Ireland’s entertainment industry. Researching their story took me from family memories to archives, newspapers, theatres and long-forgotten corners of Irish history.

My current book-length project is very different, but also deeply personal. OUTNUMBERED is a memoir about becoming mother to identical triplets at forty, and about what happens when three people who begin life as an inseparable unit grow up and insist on becoming themselves. It is a story about motherhood, marriage, divorce, illness, grief, resilience and letting go—and about the complicated, funny and sometimes exasperating business of being outnumbered.

I write because I am curious. I write because people are interesting. And after all these years, I am still not quite finished finding out what happens next.

Wendy Elliman

Author • Journalist • Editor