Diane Lawson was born and raised in a spectacularly tiny town in Missouri. She studied medicine at the University of Illinois School of Medicine and did her residency in psychiatry at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, where she also did her Psychoanalytic Training at the Institute for Psychoanalysis. she earned an MFA from Vermont College. She has two children and is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in full time private practice in San Antonio, Texas.