Francine Mathews was born in Binghamton, NY in 1963, the
last of six girls. Her father was a retired general in the
Air Force, her mother a beautiful woman who loved to dance.
The family spent their summers on Cape Cod, where two of
the Barron girls now live with their families; Francine's
passion for Nantucket and the New England shoreline dates
from her earliest memories. She grew up in Washington,
D.C., and attended Georgetown Visitation Preparatory
School, a two hundred year-old Catholic school for girls
that shares a wall with Georgetown University. Her father
died of a heart attack during her freshman year.
In 1981, she started college at Princeton – one of the most
formative experiences of her life. There she fenced for the
club varsity team and learned to write news stories for The
Daily Princetonian – a hobby that led to two part-time jobs
as a journalist for The Miami Herald and The San Jose
Mercury News. Francine majored in European History,
studying Napoleonic France, and won an Arthur W. Mellon
Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities in her senior year.
But the course she remembers most vividly from her time at
Princeton is "The Literature of Fact," taught by John
McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and staff writer
for The New Yorker. John influenced Francine's writing more
than even she knows and certainly more than she is able to
say. If there were an altar erected to the man in Colorado,
she'd place offerings there daily. He's her personal god of
craft.
Francine spent three years at Stanford pursuing a doctorate
in history; she failed to write her dissertation (on the
Brazilian Bar Association under authoritarianism; can you
blame her?) and left with a Masters. She applied to the
CIA, spent a year temping in Northern Virginia while the
FBI asked inconvenient questions of everyone she had ever
known, passed a polygraph test on her twenty-sixth
birthday, and was immediately thrown into the Career
Trainee program: Boot Camp for the Agency's Best and
Brightest. Four years as an intelligence analyst at the CIA
were profoundly fulfilling, the highlights being Francine's
work on the Counterterrorism Center's investigation into
the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland,
in 1988, and sleeping on a horsehair mattress in a Spectre-
era casino in the middle of Bratislava. Another peak moment
was her chance to debrief ex-President George Bush in
Houston in 1993. But what she remembers most about the
place are the extraordinary intelligence and dedication of
most of the staff – many of them women – many of whom
cannot be named.
She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year
later. Fifteen books have followed, along with sundry
children, dogs, and houses. When she's not writing, she
likes to ski, garden, needlepoint, and buy art.
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