About
A graduate of Smith College, Jeanne began her career on Wall Street and later worked in strategic planning at Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati, before making her way to Boston where she worked as a Research Associate at Harvard Business School. Writing case studies and business articles, however, couldn’t satisfy her creative longings. She turned to memoir writing and later to fiction. Jeanne is the author of EDEN: A Novel. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Boston Book Festival as well as being on the Board of Directors and an avid student at Grub Street, one of the nation’s preeminent creative writing centers. Jeanne and her husband split their time between Boston and Westerly, RI and have three grown children. When she’s not writing, Jeanne can be found playing squash, skiing, or taking in the sunset over Little Narragansett Bay.
Before attending Smith College, Jeanne grew up in Newport Beach, CA. She graduated from Newport Harbor High School. Jeanne currently serves on the board of the College Squash Association. She has held numerous positions in the Squash world, most notably of having been the first (and only) female chairperson of US Squash, the national governing body for the sport. She is also was a national champion in both singles and doubles.
Featured Work
EDEN: A Novel
Becca Meister Fitzpatrick, wife, mother, grandmother, and pillar of the community, is the dutiful steward of her family’s iconic summer tradition until she discovers her recently deceased husband squandered their nest egg. While coming to terms with what is likely to be her last season in Long Harbor, she decides to introduce the child she gave up for adoption fifty years prior to the family. Inspired by her granddaughter’s acceptance in the face of impending single-motherhood, Becca summons the courage to reveal the secret she’d been forced to bury. The question is how her daughter, Rachel, will react. They’d always had a strained relationship, made rockier when Rachel came home from college with an unplanned pregnancy of her own.
Eden is the account of the days leading up to the Fourth of July weekend, as Becca prepares to disclose her secret, and her son and brothers conspire to put the estate on the market, interwoven with the century old history of Becca’s family, of her parents’ beginnings and ascent into affluence, and of her mother’s own secret struggles in the grand home her father named “Eden”.
