Caroline Paul

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Caroline Paul on the cover of Fighting Fire

Caroline Paul (born July 29, 1963 in New York City) is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. Trained as a journalist and documentary filmmaker at Stanford University, she instead pursued a career as a firefighter, as one of the first women hired by the San Francisco Fire department. She worked most of her career on Rescue 2, where she and her crew were responsible for search and rescue in fires. Rescue 2 members were also trained and sent on scuba dive searches, rope and rapelling rescues, surf rescues, confined space rescues, all hazardous material calls, and the most severe train and car wrecks.

Her first book was the nonfiction memoir "Fighting Fire", published in 1998. Her second, the novel "East Wind, Rain", was published in 2006, when a knee injury in a fire compelled her to give up firefighting and write, with a full knee replacement, fulltime.

[edit] Trivia

Caroline flies ultralights and paragliders.
Her younger brother is Jonathan Paul, a famous animal rights proponent who is best known for posing as a fur buyer to get video footage of the treatment and killing of minks.
An accomplished athlete, she has competed on the U.S. National Luge Team in trials for the Olympics.
Her identical twin sister, Alexandra Paul, is an actress, probably best known for her role as Lt. Stephanie Holden in the television series Baywatch from 1992 to 1997.
Together, the two sisters occupied a single slot on People Magazine's list of "50 Most Beautiful People" for 1997.
She is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a workspace co-operative that also includes Po Bronson, ZZ Packer, Tom Barbash, Peter Orner, Jason Roberts and B. Ruby Rich, among others.