Bernays attended the Brearley School on New York City"s Upper East Side, graduating in 1948. Bernays has been published widely in national magazines and journals and is a long-time teacher of writing at Boston University, Boston College, Holy Cross, Harvard Extension, Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and Master of Fine Arts Program at Lesley University.
A graduate of Barnard College, she was managing editor of discovery, a literary magazine, before moving from New York to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1959 when she began her career as a novelist. She serves as chairman of the board of Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and co-president of Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. Her mother, Doris East. Fleischman, was a writer and feminist.
The New York they leave behind, one that New York itself had left behind, was something unmatchable anywhere in the world.
