Heather Lewis was born in Bedford, New York and attended Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of three published novels. The first, House Rules (1994), details the experiences of a fifteen year old girl working as a show rider of horses-an experience the author herself had in her teenage years. Lewis's second novel, The Second Suspect (1998), follows the struggles of a female police investigator trying to prove the guilt of a powerful and influential businessman responsible for the rape and murder of several young women. The third, posthumously published novel, Notice (2004), describes the experiences of a young prostitute, Nina and her involvement with a sadist and his wife. Her works explore aspects of American culture, such as the connections between power, drugs, sex, violence, love and justice. Through these themes, Heather Lewis draws the reader into questioning the nature of love and relationships, the character of human nature or motivation and, most challengingly, the boundary between pleasure and pain. Significantly, the novels present strong, yet vulnerable female characters offering an alternative to more typical American narrative constructions driven by male protagonists within male-dominated scenes.
Heather Lewis taught at the Writer's Voice and contributed to various anthologies of literature including Best Lesbian Erotica (1996, 1997), Once Upon a Time: Erotic Fairy Tales for Women (1996), and A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories (1999). The collection also includes work by Allan Gurganus, Dale Peck, Mike Corrigan, Margaret Au, as well as shorter pieces by Sarah Schulman, Meg Daly, and others. Heather Lewis returned to New York in the fall of 2001, after a year in Arizona. She ended her life in May of 2002, in New York.