Brundage, Elizabeth

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BRUNDAGE, Elizabeth

PERSONAL: Married; husband a physician; children: three. Education: Iowa Writers' Workshop, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—MA. Agent—Gretchen Koss, Viking/Penguin Group, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: James Michener Award.

WRITINGS:

The Doctor's Wife (novel), Viking (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Greensboro Review, Witness, and New Letters; work represented in anthologies, including I've Always Meant to Tell You: Letters to Our Mothers.

SIDELIGHTS: Elizabeth Brundage's debut novel, The Doctor's Wife, is set in upstate New York, where Brundage and her husband, a physician, lived during his residency. The doctor of the story is Michael Knowles, a successful ob-gyn who agrees to help Celina, a former girlfriend, by performing abortions in her free clinic. Annie, Michael's wife and the mother of his two children, feels neglected because Michael has little time for her, and she begins an affair with artist Simon Haas, an alcoholic womanizer she meets at St. Catherine's College, where she teaches a creative writing course. Meanwhile, Lydia, Simon's young wife, becomes an adherent of charismatic preacher Reverend Tim, who leads protests against the clinic. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that Lydia "is the enigma that fuels Brundage's examination of what happens when we are drawn to the very things that promise to destroy us."

A central protagonist in The Doctor's Wife, Michael begins to suffer the consequences of working at the controversial clinic when he is run off the road. The clinic is soon defaced, then bombed, and ultimately all of the workers' lives are threatened. The violence escalates with a killing and a kidnapping as Brundage's story proceeds to a conclusion, which was called "realistic yet satisfyingly dramatic" by Marianne Fitzgerald in a review of the novel for Library Journal.