Judith Spaeth was born in May 10, 1944 in San Luis Obispo, California, USA, and grew up all over the country, the oldest of three children of an appliance-store franchiser and a housewife. Before majored in Business at Northwestern University, Judy married with a dentist from St. Louis, Missouri, and they had two children, a daugther, Whitney (b. 1967), and a son, Clay (1969). But the marriage didn't work out, and at 25, she became a divorced mother to two.
She worked as comptroller of a major trucking company and was the first female executive producer at a CBS radio station. In 1974, while working as an assistant director on a TV-commercial film crew in St. Louis, she met an advertising director at General Motors, Michael McNaught, a divorced father of five. The pair married later that year and moved with her children to a Detroit suburb. Judy devoted herself to homemaking and slowly went little crazy. She started to read in her spare time, and she bought by accident her first romance: "The Flame and the Flower" by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, and she loved it. With her husband encouragement, who buying her a new typewriter, she decided to try …