About Me

I’m Mary and I like to write. I have always written, partly because I like being good at things (don’t we all?) and reading and writing were the only things I wasn’t awful at at school. Sure, these two things come in handy, academically speaking, but I was one of those annoyingly precocious readers who could spell all the words in the advanced spelling scheme before I’d learnt to add two single digit numbers, yet mispronounced many of them becase I’d never heard them said out loud. I chose Wild Swans by Jung Chang for my book report at the start of Year 4, and remember my teacher having to tactfully explain to the class that a concubine was not in fact a special sort of acrobat, as I had thought.

Anyway, I started writing young and I’ve never stopped. I spent a few years, post-uni, as a full-time bookseller and part-time writer/perfomer of poetry. I then went into teaching and, despite spending several hours a day laminating bits of paper and crying in the stationery cupboard, continued to write whenever I could. After three and half years of that I had my first child, and thankfully he was a great napper, so I wrote two novels for children while he slept and went on two Arvon retreats to work on them. While the excellent advice and encouragement of my tutors definitely helped me hone my skills as a writer, after a long stretch of editing and submitting with no success, I resolved to leave both novels in a drawer, and decide what, if anything, to do with them at an as-yet-unspecified later date. I then wrote a couple of comic monologues about living with hEDS, both of which were accepted for publication in Indivisible, an anthology of writing by people with hidden disabilities. In a regrettable crisis of confidence, I withdrew one of the monologues, but the other is in there and the book is available to buy from the Cultureword website for a mere £6.

This exciting step into the world of publication got me thinking that perhaps leaning into my incurable unseriousness was the way forward and I’ve spent the past couple of years throwing myself into various forms of comedy. Given that I’m happiest either sitting in a wood or reading a book (ideally both at the same time), this has been nothing short of exhilarating. Though fun, the logistical demands of standup proved too gruelling for me, and while improv was wonderfully liberating, I still found it too personally cringe-inducing to keep me coming back for more. Now safely back at my desk, I’ve been writing comic novels at the rate of two a year, by which I mean I started writing them a year ago and have now written two, but I see no reason not to keep up this pace, given how much fun they’ve been.

The first, Ariadne Jones, Bookseller, is a coming of age/romantic comedy inspired by my own youth as a bookseller in Bloomsbury, although I worked at the big Waterstones rather than the dusty little bookshop featured in the novel. (This is no doubt influenced by my obsessive watching of Black Books, only mine is run by a much nicer man.) Ariadne is about to do the rounds at various literary agents, so wish me luck. The second is a family-based social comedy/rom-com mash-up of two of my favourite Katharine Hepburn films, Holiday and Bringing Up Baby. Both novels are set over a relatively short time frame and are in some ways closer to scripts than traditional novels, a fact which reveals my life-long dream of writing for the screen, both big and small. One day, Pinky, one day.

I live with my family in the small town of Macclesfield, on the edge of the Peak District. When I’m not writing or chasing after my two delightfully feral children, I work part-time as a therapeutic forest school leader (more about that here.)