BLACK BLOGGAH

"There's something very sexy about surgery. You actually have your hands in someone else's body."

Shonda Rhimes, the creator of the hit medical series Grey's Anatomy



The creator of the hit series Grey's Anatomy hit the front page of the New York Times Arts section today. Her creation which is described as a "mixture of medicine, drama and sex" captured 25.4 million viewers in its season premiere and gave ABC execs something to celebrate as the network wound up No. 1 in the crucial 18- to 49-year-old demographic for the first week of the 2006-07 season.

"The youngest of six, Rhimes was raised in University Park, Illinois, outside Chicago, in a family of storytellers who were "obsessed with reading." To this day, she has about 20 books by her bedside at any given time. Her appetite runs from trashy novels to serious literature. Recently she was nibbling on The Soul of a Chef, All Girls: Single Sex Education and Why It Matters, Invisible Man, and The Undomestic Goddess. At eight years old, she remembers reading John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman but later, as an undergrad at Dartmouth, found herself drawn to the spoken word, acting in and directing plays. After graduation, she took a job in advertising, which she hated because "you're writing the things people are turning away from."

extended quote from The Cutting Edge: Shonda Rhimes dissects Grey's Anatomy Written by Pamela K. Johnson (From the September 2005 issue of "Written By")