Therese Ambrosi Smith wrote of young women choosing lives different from their mothers' as a UCLA Writers' Program student. Her personal tales of work and travel - climbing mountains, surveying logging roads, designing parks and playgrounds, tending bar and selling fish - were the subjects of her short fiction. In 2006, she visited the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historic Park and was offered a remarkable collection of oral histories by Park Ranger Elizabeth Tucker. Since then, stories of real-life "Rosies" have informed her work. Wax is her first novel.