Elizabeth L. Silver

Elizabeth L. Silver (born October 27, 1978) is an American writer, attorney, and creative writing teacher. She has published two novels with legal themes, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton and The Majority (2023), as well as a medical memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty (2017).

Life and career Born in New Orleans and raised in New Orleans and Dallas, Silver comes from a Jewish family and is the daughter of a surgeon. After college, she taught English as a second language in Costa Rica and worked in book publishing in New York. She subsequently earned a master's degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in 2004. She continues to work occasionally in the legal field. During Donald Trump's first term as president, she spent a week working as a volunteer attorney for asylum seekers at the Mexico–United States border.

Silver married Amir Moldovan, a rheumatologist, on May 28, 2006. The couple live in Los Angeles with their two children.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2022, Silver had a double mastectomy in February 2023, accompanied by chemotherapy and radiation treatment. She wrote articles for The Guardian and Ms. magazine highlighting the inadequacy of mammograms for screening women with dense breast tissue.

Writing Silver has published two novels, both inspired by her legal training and experience. Her first novel, The Execution of Noa P. Singleton, centers on a 35-year-old woman who has spent ten years on death row for murdering her father's pregnant girlfriend. The novel explores the evolving relationship between the murderer and the victim's mother, a Philadelphia attorney, who offers to convince the state governor to commute Noa’s sentence to life imprisonment if Noa will reveal why she carried out the killing. It has been translated into six languages.

Additionally, Silver has published a medical memoir, The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty, chronicling her experience as a parent within the medical system after her six-week-old daughter suffered an intracerebral hemorrage and was admitted to the newborn and infant critical care unit at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

Notable works The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (Crown Publishing Group, 2013) The Tincture of Time: A Memoir of (Medical) Uncertainty (Penguin Press, 2017) The Majority (Riverhead Books, 2023)