The Mary Years

By: Julie Marie Wade

The Mary Years is a nonfiction novella that chronicles one young woman’s quarter-century love affair with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Part bildungsroman and part televisual ekphrasis, this is the story of Mary Richards re-seen through the eyes of Julie Marie Wade.

Who’s your hero? What television show did you binge-watch, even before “binge-watching” was part of our vernacular? For Julie Marie Wade, the hero is Mary Tyler Moore, the television show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. From its premiere on Nick at Nite in 1992 until the death of its eponymous lead actress in 2017, this nonfiction novella follows our protagonist from her pre-teen years in Seattle through tenure at an academic institution in Miami—a journey modeled in surprising, tender, and humorous ways on Mary’s own journey from Roseburg to Minneapolis, to the WJM newsroom and beyond.