R. Burrow grew up in a small, hilly town in West Virginia. In her teens, she traveled to various parts of Europe with her family, and went to school in the U.K. Before graduating high school, she began to suffer from symptoms of schizophrenia, and would continue to struggle with the illness for the next ten years of her life. During this time, she was able to travel to Buffalo, and attended the State University of New York, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. After winning the long, hard battle with mental illness, she married a man she loved, and settled in Upstate New York. After years of living a quiet home life, she felt a sudden and strong desire to tell her story; it was then, at age 31, that she began to write about her experiences, in the hope that it would educate and inform others from the rarely-heard point of view of the patient. The material seemed to flow almost effortlessly, and the novel was completed in a year and a half. About the same time "The Tree Outside The Window" was published, the author was blessed with a beautiful son, James, and is in the process of writing a collection of short stories, as well as another long fiction novel, tentatively entitled, In Handcuffs.