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Mary Doria Russell was born near Chicago in 1950 to a Navy nurse and a
Marine Corps drill sergeant and, as a consequence, had a remarkable if
dismaying vocabulary prior to attending Sacred Heart Catholic Elementary
School, where she learned discretion. She was an A student, a Girl Scout
and a virgin bride, and waited until she was 29 to have her adolescent
rebellion. She does not recommend this lifestyle to others, although it
worked well enough for her.
A paleoanthropologist with specialties in
bone biology and biomechanics, Dr. Russell did extended field work in
Australia and Croatia. She had a great time, published a lot of stuff, won
a bunch of awards and grants but eventually got fed up with Academe and
quit. She spent four lucrative years writing computer manuals before
beginning her novel, The Sparrow. Russell estimates that about 22
anthropologists, world-wide, read her academic publications and NOBODY
ever reads computer manuals, so she figured that if even just her friends
read her novel, she was way ahead in terms of readership because she has
lots of friends. A recovering academic, she must still rely on a Higher
Power to resist the impulse to footnote everything she writes.
Mary and Don Russell have been married for 27 years. In a row. To each
other. Don is a software engineer and a prince among husbands. They have
one son, Daniel, born in Croatia in 1985. Danny is entirely splendid
except for being way too good at math. The Russells live in Cleveland,
Ohio, and like it very much, thank you.
A convert to Judaism (and no, Don's not Jewish), Mary has maintained a
connection with Catholic education in adulthood. She has a long
association with St. Adalbert School, an extraordinarily effective inner
city elementary school in a Cleveland neighborhood that the FBI once named
the most violent in northeastern Ohio. For helping to raise over $330,000
in grants and contributions to the school's building fund, Mary was paid
$1.00 a year and all the Nescafe Instant Coffee she could drink, which
isn't much because Nescafe is awful. Half of her advance for The Sparrow
went to to St. Adalbert's, to help build a library for the
school.
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