Done Growed Up

About the Author

Mary Morony is an author who can write about tragedy from the inside and guides her readers through it to compassion, humor and recovery. She brings Southern charm, irreverence and wit to bear against subjects as vast as racism and as personal as alcoholism, always with a heart and soul that makes her work undeniably appealing. Her Apron Strings trilogy, a series of novels that draw on the life she knew growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a time when Virginia was still very much a part of the Jim Crow South. But amid the chaos, the woman who was the family servant also became Morony's inspiration, teaching her love and acceptance with warmth, humor, and unending patience - and becoming the model, finally, for a central character in Apron Strings. She finds no shortage of material for her novels in the everyday lives around her. My mantra is: If it doesn't kill you, it will make a good story - and even if it does kill you, it will make a good story for someone! I can and have found things to laugh about in death, divorce, mental illness, and most of all, people's pettiness - including my own." She says, "I have lived a life chock full of stories, and I do mean chock full." She likes big projects, has a hard time reining herself in and seldom does things in a conventional time frame. This may account for her not having finished her B.A. - in English, with a concentration in creative writing, from the University of Virginia - until she was in her forties. by then with four children. The university gave her the opportunity to focus on the path that led to Apron Strings, a distillation of her experiences: a Southern childhood, in a world where everyone drank; where divorce was the "D" word and nice people didn't get one, even though her parents' marriage was in pieces; and where the one adult who could show her unconditional love couldn't sit with her in the movie theater or a restaurant. Here lies the saving grace of her writing: As her characters grow and learn, she is able to refract her own life's struggles, defeats and victories through them. A life that could have mired her in suffering has bred instead a writer full of wit, compassion, and the wisdom that comes from living and often laughing through it. Morony's characters and settings are captured with sensitivity and an eye for realistic detail, her plots skillfully crafted by one who has "been there."