Laurie grew up in a lush Ohio river valley, in a town called Gates Mills (named after Mr. Gates, who built a mill there in the 1800s).  With its white picket fences, red brick school house, and steepled church on the banks of the Chagrin River, it felt like a village straight out of a fairy tale.

Her most persistent memory was of her parents driving by the town’s polo field at dusk.  They’d stop their Plymouth Valiant and she’d leap out to run through the bank of mist hovering a few feet above the expanse of emerald green.  She wanted to see what it looked like inside the mist.

Compared to the highly monitored childhoods of today, hers was totally unsupervised.  On humid summer afternoons, she’d recruit friends to play Blind-Man’s Bluff in a corner of the community pool.  She’d investigate crawfish in the stream behind her house, or bicycle to Henry’s, the candy store at the end of a suspension bridge, to buy Double Bubble gum and licorice swirls.

Her father shined his wingtips at breakfast every morning before heading to his job at a bank in Cleveland.  And when he retired, he served two terms as mayor of Gates Mills. 

After Laurie graduated from Gates Mills Elementary, she enrolled in Hathaway Brown School for Girls in Shaker Heights.  There, she wore the school uniform – bobby socks, saddle shoes, gold blouse, and brown jumper, so indestructible, it wouldn’t burn in the bonfire she set with her classmates after graduation.

Bred in this petri dish of Midwest conventionality, she seemed destined to settle down behind her own white picket fence and raise her own family.  But that’s not what happened.

She attended Kenyon, a men’s liberal arts college in the middle of the Ohio cornfields, as a member of the second coed class since the school’s founding in 1820.  Following graduation, she moved to San Diego and then on to LA, in the anything-goes eighties.

In the City of Angels, she went on a spiritual quest in all manner of venue – an Indian guru’s apartment in Beverly Hills, a Hogwarts-style psychic college, and a hilltop Hindu convent.  And her professional trajectory proved equally peripatetic – from litigation paralegal and market analyst to investigative journalist and counselor.  While varied, each occupation cast her in an identical role – as a secrets farmer, harvesting the hidden. 

But no occupation allowed Laurie to play a spy as much as her current one, as a memoirist.  Mining secrets buried in three hundred past diaries, she has written two books – A Different Kind of Vow: Rewriting My Happily Ever After, followed by The Last Home on the Left, about her fourteen years working at a century-old mission on LA’s skid row.  Only by writing these two memoirs did she crack the code of who she is.  So, her real bio lies within the covers of these books, to be published in April 2026 and May 2027.

Laurie is the oldest of fifteen children, including one biological brother – a Hollywood cinematographer – and thirteen stepsiblings (three named Dave).  In her free time, she enjoys traveling to faraway lands, watching documentaries, journaling, and playing with her large brown poodle, Bella.