Unlike most writers, Adrienne Brodeur did not know she was going to be a writer. She didn’t major in English (she received a BA from Columbia College in Urban Studies). She doesn’t have an MFA in Fiction (she has a MGA – Master in Government Administration – from U. Penn). She didn’t take countless writers’ workshops, belong to book clubs or go to poetry slams. In fact, with two writer parents, she avoided the world of letters for as long as she possibly could.

Adrienne grew up in New York and Massachusetts, spending summers on Cape Cod. After college, being a typically idealistic (going-to-save-the-world) twenty-something year old, she moved to California to pursue a career in politics and public policy. At first she loved her work, however, after about six years, it dawned on her that if she followed her current trajectory, she’d soon be a bureaucrat. Not her life’s ambition. Plus she noticed that she wasn’t reading political journals, only literary ones.

So in 1994, Adrienne upended her life. She pulled up stakes and left a nice home on Mission Bay in San Diego and a secure job in county government to move to New York City, where for about the same monthly ding, she moved into a tiny studio apartment above a restaurant called Curry-In-A-Hurry, all to try to break into publishing. After a lean year of struggling to get a (paying) gig at a literary magazine, she decided to start her own out of her tiny apartment. A year later, Zoetrope: All-Story was born. Co-founded with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Adrienne was the editor in chief of Zoetrope: All-Story  until 2002. During her tenure, the magazine won numerous prizes, most notably the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction in 2001. She also directed Zoetrope’s annual writers’ workshop at the Coppola’s resort in Belize, and edited two anthologies of the magazine’s best stories.

But as the saying goes: all good things must end and in 2002, Adrienne decided to make another big professional change: She resigned as editor in chief of Zoetrope to write a novel. After a furious couple of years of reading (she was a judge for the National Book Award) and writing, she handed in the manuscript in the fall of 2004. Then things really got busy. In 2005, she got married, Man Camp was published, she had a baby and moved into an apartment that fit her expanding family (she has two step sons as well).

Currently, when Adrienne is not playing with her daughter or taking care of her family, she’s working on a screenplay and her next novel. The screenplay – working title: LOSING DICK – is a dark romantic comedy about three women who, feeling duped by the cultural fantasy of domesticity, are trying to dump their husbands. The novel – working title: MOTHERLOAD – is about a mother who confides in her fifteen-year-old daughter that she’s been kissed by a family friend (which leads to an affair) and the devastating effect that the secret has on the future of the family.