Helene Joy Phillips was born on September 4, 1927 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Abel H. Phillips, a merchant, and Cecelia Blum Phillips. She attended Allentown High School in Allentown, Pennsylvania from 1942-1944 and Moravian Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania from 1944-1945. She entered Mount Holyoke College in 1945 and received her B.A. in 1949 with a self-designed major in Latin American culture. She married Philip R. Herzig on September 18, 1949 and they had three children. By 1983, Herzig was working as a feature editor at the "North Shore Magazine" in Great Neck, New York.