Judi graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in English Literature in 1985. After finishing school, she moved to West Berlin, working there for The Berliner, an English Language publication with the format of The New Yorker. She was there when the Berlin Wall fell, and came back to the United States in 1990, carrying her large book collection back to Los Angeles with her. During the early nineties, she continued to visit the Southern Minnesota area where she grew up and think about the lives of her mother and grandmother. Her mother was a dark, brown eyed beauty, very different looking from the rest of the blondish, blue eyed family, and she wondered why she looked nothing like her grandfather. Later, after 2000, with encouragement from the writing of Henry Miller and Hemingway, she began to write a fictionalized account of the lives of the two women.