Bio
I was born in Columbus, Ohio, with the name Laura Ann Fairchild. My
earliest memories come from Seattle, Washington, where my family lived in the Magnolia neighborhood near the Puget Sound. I loved the deep, rainy colors of Seattle.
At age eight, my family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where I stayed through high school, spending most of my time writing poetry, playing tennis, and earning money as an amateur violinist. After graduating from Broughton High School in 1982, I went to college at Harvard, and lived in Cabot House with a group of eight talented and diverse women who inspire me to this day.
My favorite class was a poetry workshop with Seamus Heaney, and I graduated with a degree in English in 1986. While at Harvard, I played violin with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, touring in Russia, Europe and Asia. On an orchestra tour I met my future husband, trumpeter John Brodie. We married after my graduation, and lived in Washington, DC, where I worked on campaign finance reform for Common Cause.
In 1988 we moved to Lexington, VA, so that John could take a job as band director at the Virginia Military Institute. I commuted to Charlottesville to work on a PhD at the University of Virginia, and with the help of a dissertation fellowship from the American Association of University Women and a Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Grant, I wrote a dissertation focused on widows in English literature. Since that time, all of my writing has been tied to women’s studies. My favorite chapter from that dissertation was on husbands who fake their deaths in order to spy on their wives, and that inspired my recent novel, The Widow’s Season.
My eldest daughter, Julia, was born just as I was finishing graduate school. From there, I began part-time teaching at various local colleges, and I started my first book, Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women. The book covered the transition to coeducation at America’s last all-male military college. I served on VMI’s executive committee for coeducation, and taught a few courses for VMI’s English department while researching the book, which gave me an insider’s view of the Institute’s unique culture. The book was published by Pantheon (2000) and Vintage (2001) and was featured on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show.
During the three years while the book was in progress, I welcomed two more daughters into the world, Rachel and Kathryn, and I began teaching steadily at Washington and Lee University. My next book, The Widow’s Season, won the Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Society’s 2005 prize for Best Novel-in-Progress. That book was published in 2009 by Berkley Books, a Penguin imprint.
My latest project is a memoir of one year that I spent homeschooling my oldest daughter, Julia, when she was ten. It's called Love in a Time of Homeschooling: A Mother and Daughter’s Uncommon Year, to be published by Harper in April, 2010. I'm also at work on a second novel that will be published by Berkley, so stay tuned for more news....