About Leanne Elise Smith

Because of illness...

I grew up in a small Rhode Island town, where I discovered I could write almost before I understood what writing was. I was fifteen when I began my first novel — but by then, I had already been fighting a war no one could see.

For most of my life, I lived in the grip of something with a name that few people understood and even fewer dared to speak: agoraphobia. The panic attacks came like sudden storms, terror rising out of nowhere until they swallowed my days whole. They drove me out of school after the eighth grade. When my family and friends finally understood what was happening, they were stunned to realize I had been battling this my entire life — silently, secretly, alone. Back then, almost nothing was known about panic disorder. No one knew what it was. No one knew how to help me. And so they could only stand by and watch as the illness slowly closed its hand around me.

This is the cruel truth about agoraphobia: the more you surrender to the fear, the more freedom it steals. I learned to survive through avoidance — first leaving school to escape the worst of the panic, then, year by year, retreating from anything that might spark a single moment of dread. In time, that retreat became a prison. I was trapped within the five rooms of my own home — and even there, I never once felt truly safe.

Escape through fantasy...

When the real world becomes unbearable, you learn to build another one. Loneliness and boredom were my constant companions, and I had no internet, no easy escape — only television, music, and books. Through them, I could live a hundred adventurous lives without ever stepping past my own front door.

It began with a simple subscription. A company called Silhouette Special Edition mailed me four romance novels every month, faithfully, like letters from a world I longed to belong to. I read them, then read them again. Four a month was never enough, so I found more — Zebra Books, Harlequin, Avon — and my family kept the stories coming. The cold, frightening world outside faded away, replaced by one that was warm, inviting, and blessedly safe.

When reading wasn't enough...

By fifteen, I had devoured nearly two hundred romance novels in two years — and I was restless. The stories that once thrilled me had grown predictable. Worse, so many ended in a quiet disappointment: authors who began with fire and passion, only to let their stories fade into a dull, predictable lull by the final chapters. Finishing a book began to feel deflating instead of uplifting.

So I started dreaming up a love story of my own. It played in my mind again and again until I knew every face, every line of dialogue, every shared laugh and every tear by heart. With little else to fill my days, that daydream became as real and satisfying as anything I had ever read. And that was where my writing truly began. For the next two years, the stories poured out of me, pen to paper. By seventeen I had built a vocabulary and an understanding of storytelling that astonished my family — no one could quite believe I had taught myself such a difficult art with no school to guide me. The novel I created was called Silent Mysteries. Other stories crowded my imagination, and I leapt between them as inspiration struck — but Silent Mysteries was always my favorite, and it grew the largest of them all.

Then the world was returned...

Just after my seventeenth birthday, my family fought one last time to find me help. After years of failed counseling and therapy, something — finally — was different. A doctor came into my life who could give me back what the illness had taken: focus, structure, control. Through months of intense counseling and the help of medication, I unbarred the doors I had locked so tightly shut, and I stepped, slowly, back into the world.

Silent Mysteries fell quietly into the background as I drank in my newfound freedom for everything it was worth. For so long I had pretended not to care what lay beyond my walls — but now it was finally mine to discover. The years moved fast. I found work, went on to college, and fell in love. I set aside my dream of becoming an author and chased instead the ordinary, extraordinary experiences I had never once dared to hope for.

Then, as I reached thirty, life began to settle. I built a website called Intersoap Magazine — my first real writing for the public. It brought me recognition and joy, but something was still missing. That something arrived with my first child. My daughter filled every last hollow space my lonely childhood had carved into me.

And now...

Those days are long behind me. Today I live a full life — writing for The Quiet Corner and raising my family. This website is meant to be an escape from the everyday world, a place that mirrors where I once lived and now houses the romantic fiction I have always loved to create.

You are welcome here anytime, and you may stay as long as you like. Help shape the future of each novel as you read it. Share your thoughts, email me, celebrate or argue over the twists and turns of the stories alongside other readers. It is my hope to craft some of the most compelling romance novels in years — and that you'll find them as satisfying to read as I find them to write.

Somewhere behind the scenes of it all, I am still writing. It is still an escape — but no longer a way of hiding from the world. Now, romance simply enriches a life already full of adventure.

To everyone out there,