Born Leslie Mulford, a Jersey girl, I enjoyed a happy childhood in the lovely Quaker town of Moorestown (where Alice Paul attended Friends School and where Susanna and Alice spent their last days together at a Quaker nursing home). After graduating from Moorestown High, I spent my early adulthood as an itinerant student, earning a BA in English from Mary Baldwin College in Virginia (with my junior year abroad in Paris), an MA in English from Boston’s Northeastern University, and an MBA in Finance from Boston’s Suffolk University. 

I wore many professional hats in the Boston area: instructor of writing and literature at Northeastern University, assistant to the VP and Treasurer at Suffolk University, public finance administrator at a bonding authority, and capital budget officer at MIT.

A constant seeker of change, I certainly found it when I moved to France in 1991 to marry Laurent, who was in the French air force in the early years of our marriage, first in Alsace near Strasbourg, then in Picardy a couple of hours north of Paris. We were bitten by the renovation bug in our first home and became professional long-term flippers -- restoring houses, selling them, and moving on to the next, first in the Pas de Calais, then in the coastal resort of Le Touquet where we also ran a vacation rental business, and finally in Normandy where we managed a rental property and ran a bed and breakfast south of Rouen.

In a quest for adventure and change, Laurent and I left France to live in the U.S. in 2009, where we continued our long-term house flipping, first in beautiful Kennebunk, Maine, then on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. 

Gypsies to the core, we packed our belongings once again and left the U.S. to return to France in 2019. We landed in the Berry region near Bourges, having found a lovely century-old manor with a fascinating story, which will probably become a book one day. Bringing the house and gardens back to life has kept us gratefully busy during these trying times of the pandemic. We also indulge daily in our shared passion of cooking, whenever possibly using produce from the garden.

In whatever spare time I have, I am spreading the word about my new book, Susanna and Alice: Quaker Rebels. However, the next book is beckoning me to finish it. I began Soul Food during my years in Kennebunk, when I ran my church’s hospitality program: part memoirs, part cookbook, it presents my favorite recipes from America and France, and every recipe has a story.