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Sara was born on July 26,1954 in Yokosuka, Japan. As a diplomat's daughter, she learned from an early age how to make others feel welcome by asking them about their lives and experiences. Growing up as a “global nomad” led to her multifaceted life of learning, writing, teaching, activism, and social work. Decades later, she came to understand the hidden aspects of her father and her own fractured childhood through writing her first memoir, entitled Born under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy's Daughter.
While still in social work school, Sara had the opportunity to go to Patagonia with her future husband Peter to study whales. Bringing her interest in human development to the marine world, she and Peter spent 18 months studying the separation and individuation process of Southern right whale mothers and their calves. Sara's first published paper, co-authored with Peter, appeared in the Journal of Animal Behavior and remains, 50 years later, a seminal paper in the field.
Following her return to the US, Sara worked as a social worker at Stanford University's Child Guidance Clinic before returning to Patagonia on a Kennedy Fellowship as part of her doctoral work at Harvard. Writing was becoming the through line that would accompany her for the rest of her life. Dusk on the Campo: A Journey in Patagonia , the first of her seven published books, was an intimate look at the lives of sheepherders who had emigrated to remote Patagonia from Spain's Basque country. Bread of Three Rivers: The Story of a French Loaf gave Sara entré into the lives of salt farmers, hydro engineers, wheat growers, and the Medaille d'Or Boulanger baker who produced the best bread in France. In Sara's words, writing “wed art to observation.”
For Sara, learning, writing, and teaching were intertwined. She taught at the University of Minnesota, Johns Hopkins University, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and the New Directions writing program at th