My name is Mary E. Mitchell and I have lived in the Boston area for 28 years. While I may be middle-aged, married, and the mother of two grown children, I am still gorgeous, sexy and a passionate-looking woman, according to some guy on MySpace who apparently found the very same photo you are now looking at. I don’t appear anywhere near the age specified. So claims my new thirty-two-year-old admirer (one year older than my son), a guy from Brooklyn, shown in his profile photo wearing a wife-beater undervest, tight jeans and a little bling. WO, he concludes. hot mommy alert. Hubba, hubba.
Need I say any more? The point here is that there is someone out there who thinks each of us is beautiful, special and, to quote Bob Dylan, forever young. Go out and find these people. And then check the security settings on your MySpace account.
Like my young admirer, I, too, am a native of Brooklyn, born by mistake in an apartment on East 34th Street in Flatbush. My father fainted at the sight of a live birth and was taken away in an ambulance. My mother and I were taken away in a second ambulance. For a mild-mannered person who does not like to cause a scene, it was quite a beginning.
I was one of seven, and the only way to get merchandise was by doing something special to catch a parent’s attention. I tried bed-wetting and this did not work. My father was a passionate, frustrated Latin poet, and when I began writing little mystery books for him, The Penny Curran series, complete with crayoned illustrations and shoe-lace bindings, the transistor radios and Barbie Dreamhouses began rolling in. It was my first taste of success. I was an eight-year-old writer with a dry bed.
No one really wants to read an author's publication list that looks like a resume, so I will be brief. Suffice to say, my first time in ink was in 1980, in the Long Island Newsday. One of my mother’s neighbors shot my dog in the leg with a BB gun while the dog perused his trash can. I was outraged. The letter I sent to the editor was published the next day with a pretty good drawing of my dog, looking sad. From this auspicious launching point, my essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Family Circle, First for Women, and a host of other publications.
My foray into fiction garnered a 1993 PEN New England Discovery Award for my, as yet, unpublished novel, The Nearness of You. Starting Out Sideways is my first published novel, and I am ecstatic. I love my editor at Thomas Dunne Books, Erin Brown, and I am eternally grateful for her belief in me.
I am inordinately proud of being part Italian, part Irish and part Puerto Rican. It’s a common New York recipe, but I’m pleased with the way it came out. Sometimes I like to cook, sometimes I like to drink, and sometimes I like to sing and dance. Here is a photo of the Jazz trio I sing with, "Mary, Mike & Steve."
I have been a teacher most of my life but I have also been a Gaslight Girl in Chicago. I have a Masters degree in Counseling Psychology from Boston University and many of my counseling experiences and epiphanies show up in my fiction. For example, I once trained a beautiful young man to collect shopping carts from a supermarket parking lot. One last fun fact about me is this: the “E” in Mary E. Mitchell stands for Eleanor. It was my Aunt Eleanor who delivered me that fateful day in Flatbush when my father fainted and my mother was so surprised by the turn of events. Without Aunt Eleanor, I might not be here. I carry her initial as a reminder of how we are all dependent on one another in this world, and how love sees us through even the darkest channels.
