LaVyrle Spencer was born in Minnesota, where she attended high school and met and married her high school sweetheart, Dan Spencer — a decision she calls the wisest choice of her life.
Although she showed a flair for writing during high school, LaVyrle didn't begin her first novel until she was in her thirties, working as a teacher's aide at Osseo Junior High School. Spencer decided to try transferring to paper a recurring dream she was having about a story based on her grandmother's lifestyle on a Minnesota farm. She awoke at 4:00 a.m. one morning, and as Spencer recalls, "you think that you can do anything at 4:00 a.m. I wrote the first half a page in a three-ring notebook with a ball-point pen." She finished that first novel, The Fulfillment, and it was published in 1979.
LaVyrle Spencer could be a character in one of her own bestselling novels, as she has experienced as much love, pain, and bliss as any of her characters. And like her heroines she is a charming mix of fire and warmth, strength, savvy and soft-heartedness. Her books are family love stories, and the characters in her novels aren't perfect, they are real people with real problems. Before they live happily ever after they must overcome some sort of adversity — pregnancy, divorce, a lengthy separation, the loss of a loved one — and then undergo a catharsis. Along the way there are moments of anger, happiness and self- revelation. The stories center on themes of abiding love, family ties and strength in difficult times. According to Spencer, "the trademark of my books is mending relationships, showing people how to mend relationships."
Whether set in the Old West of the 1880s, or today, in suburban Minnesota, opening a Spencer novel means seeing love in a new light, and meeting characters so real it's all you can do not to climb into the pages yourself.
LaVyrle and Dan Spencer live in a beautiful Victorian house in Stillwater, Minnesota, and the Spencers often escape to their rustic log cabin deep in the Minnesota woods. LaVyrle's hobbies include gardening, travel, gourmet cooking, entertaining, playing bass guitar and the electronic piano, photography, and observing nature.
