She Started Writing Fiction at 50 (After Cancer Changed Everything) | Mary Carroll Moore's Reinvention Story
[00:00:00] Mary: I was working with a coach, and he said, What's one thing that you would do that was risky, that would honor your mother, whom you're writing this book for? And I said, I would take flying lessons because she had always promised me that she'd teach me how to fly, but she had four kids and a full-time job.
I'm 70, and on my 70th birthday, I was taking flying lessons, and that was just such a weird thing to do, and so courageous, and so amazingly out of the box for me, but I felt like, Hey, Mom, I'm doing this. I'm honoring you, I'm remembering you.
And I thought if this doesn't teach people around me, my friends, and all that, it's never too late. I don't know what would.
[00:00:38] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma, and join me weekly as I interview guests who have made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to Live the With of Your Life podcast. My guest this week is Mary Carroll Moore, and she's a bestselling and award-winning author of 13 books in three genres, including a PEN Faulkner and Lambda Literary Awards-nominated young adult novel. Qualities of Light and the prequel to a Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue.
She received her MFA from Goddard College and has taught throughout the US and abroad at various writing schools and universities since 1998. Her writing Craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards Reader's Choice Award, and before moving into fiction, she worked as a chef, a cook school owner, a cookbook author, and a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
Her first cookbook won a Julia Child IACP award, and she wrote over 200 essays and stories, and articles that have appeared in magazines and literary journals. What a wonderful conversation. She's so inspiring. Mary has lived a very full life and talks about a health diagnosis that really had her examining her life and what really brings her joy in her forties, and how she made a change to go back to school and to start writing at the age of 50. Such an inspiring story. I loved our conversation, and I think you will as well take a listen.
Mary, thank you so much for joining me today. I am so excited to have you here with me.
[00:02:39] Mary: I am so glad to be here.
[00:02:41] Aneta: Yeah, I'm so curious about your story because I want you to be able to share your background, but as I was reading through your website and looking at your background, I think your story is so inspiring because you are an example of someone who's done so many interesting things in her life and at the age of 50 decided to make a shift and to do something different. And so, will you just maybe share a little bit about your background because there's so much there that I think is really interesting.
[00:03:12] Mary: I would love to. So I grew up in a family that encouraged creativity in the arts, which was very lucky for me. We weren't off or anything. We didn't have the material benefits, but we had that love for education and learning, and the arts. So I was taught to paint. At a young age and write and cook, and do a lot of things for pleasure and creativity.
So that spirit stayed with me through my young adult years. And I decided when I got an au pair job and I lived in France for a year in my early twenties, and I learned to cook French cooking, of course. And when I returned to the States, I taught cooking for several years. And that led to collaboration with the California Culinary Academy on two cookbooks.
One of which one a Julia Child. IACP, International Association of Cooking Professionals Award, and that was such an amazing experience for me to do something I love and to have readers respond that way. So I decided this was going to be my main career, writing and publishing books if I could. So I worked as a food journalist and a cookbook author for almost two decades.
I owned a cooking school in California, and it was featured in USA Today. And eventually I got asked to write a weekly food column for the LA Times Syndicate, which went, I can't hardly believe it, to 86 papers around the US and Canada. And I really was like settled in this career, and I enjoyed it, and I loved food.
I smelled like garlic all the time. I really loved it. My passions are coming together like this. But then I got diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer in my late forties, and everything came to a halt. I was suddenly aware of the dreams that I had not realized yet, and one of which was to go back to painting, and the other was to learn to write fiction.
This took me about five years to make the decision, but I quit my food career. I finished up all my contracts with the cookbooks that were pending, and at age 50, I went back to school to get my MFA and become a fiction writer. It was probably the scariest thing I'd done, even maybe scarier than having cancer, because I was the oldest student in the room and a complete beginner again after publishing for two decades. So that was a big turning point. But it brought together all the passions of my youth, and I was really amazed at how happier my life got when I brought those dreams to reality.
[00:05:44] Aneta: Wow. I applaud you for doing that because it's not easy to decide to give up a career that's actually very successful. You were successful for so many years. Have you thought about, like, the cancer diagnosis and whether you would have made the same decisions if you didn't get sick?
[00:06:04] Mary: That's a great question, and I think I would never have made those decisions. I've talked to other cancer survivors, and for me it's been on for 25 years now. I'm past the initial survivor level, but people who have that kind of huge traumatic experience that's life-changing, it does cause you to stop and look at what you've done.
And what decisions you've made. And for me, the areas of my life that are still mediocre haven't really gotten to a satisfying place. So I had a year of chemo and treatments and recovery, and I got a lot of time to just sit there and think about my life. Where was I happy and where was I not happy?
And I really regretted having given up art for writing. I had to choose one for a career, really, at that time, and then I was able to embrace it again. But boy, it took such courage to say goodbye. I had a very lucrative career, and I was at the top of my game in a way, and then I had to say goodbye to that, or I felt like I did, and after the first year in my grad program, I didn't look back. I was so pleased with what I was learning, and I felt alive again. Not just in the literal sense, because I survived cancer, but alive again in spirit, the whole part of me that was a little deadened.
[00:07:23] Aneta: Yeah. Were there signals or little signs before the diagnosis that maybe you weren't living your purpose or dharma?
[00:07:31] Mary: Yeah. I love fiction and I've always wanted to write it. And I remember during that time before I was diagnosed, I was taking a correspondence course with the University of Iowa on how to write a novel. And I assumed that it would be so easy to translate being a food writer to being a fictional writer.
And when I first started doing the lessons, I was just astonished at how little I knew, and it set me back. You feel like you're at a place in your career, you're in your forties, you're really centered in your life, and you've done what you came for. And then I realized I hadn't done what I came for.
And so that started that little niggling doubt in me of all the things I wanted to do that I hadn't done. Yeah.
[00:08:17] Aneta: How did you decide that you wanted to go back to school rather than maybe just taking some other writing courses? because it's a big deal, a commitment to get your MFA. So, did you consider other paths, or were you pretty sure that you wanted to go back to school for this?
[00:08:31] Mary: That's a good question. No, I actually called a couple of people who had been through MFA programs, friends of mine, and also I talked to an instructor at NYU because that was one of the schools I was applying to if I did it. And he said, Why are you spending thousands of dollars to go back and get your MFA when you can just study? And I don't know why; it just didn't work for me. The idea of being a freelance learner. I really needed the structure of a program, and I wanted to be in a community with other writers, even though they were decades younger than I was, which was a little off-putting at first.
I love being around younger people, but it was like their whole culture was so different from mine, and I felt like the old lady in the room and all that. But at the same time, the community of learning was the thing that I really craved, and I was so happy once I started it that I did that.
I had saved up enough money to do it, but then I had quit my job, so I had to live off savings for the two years of the program. That was scary, too.
[00:09:31] Aneta: Yeah. Where do you think you found your courage?
[00:09:34] Mary: I come from a line of women who are courageous risk takers. My mom was a pilot in World War II. I know, I grew up with this legacy in my family of this mother who flew bomber transport, and she was 2,2, and I remember she told us stories like her engine caught on fire one time over LaGuardia, and she had to do what's called a dead stick landing, where you turn off the engine, you just glide in.
Things like that. So I grew up hearing these stories from this amazing woman. And then my grandmother was also an unusual, creative, and courageous woman. She started a hiking camp for kids in the mountains in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. And all her life, I heard from her how women can do anything.
Women can do what they dare to do. And how do you get that courage? I had these two women that I grew up with, and they mentored me about, yes, you can do whatever you want. So it was really up to me to find the guts to do it. But I had these legacies that I grew up with.
I'm very proud of both of them. They're just amazing people, both passed on now, but they really taught me courage.
[00:10:43] Aneta: I love that. And wonderful people to model this for you. Were they still alive when you decided to make your shift in your career?
[00:10:51] Mary: My mom was still alive. She was declining at that point, but she was still alive. My grandmother had passed away by then, but I wish I could have told her, because my second novel is about women pilots, and I'd written it to understand my mother better. And there was a point right before the publication of that book, I was working with a coach, and he said, What's one thing that you would do that was risky, that would honor your mother, whom you're writing this book for? And I said, I would take flying lessons because she had always promised me that she'd teach me how to fly, but she had four kids and a full-time job.
So I signed up for flying lessons, and I'm 70 and on my 70th birthday, I was taking flying lessons, and that was just such a weird thing to do and so courageous and so amazingly out of the box for me, but I felt like, Hey, Mom, I'm doing this. I'm honoring you, I'm remembering you.
And I wanted to see what it was like to be in the pilot seat up in the air. Like she's been all those years. So a fabulous experience, and I thought if this doesn't teach people around me, my friends, and all that, it's never too late. I don't know what would.
[00:11:57] Aneta: Yeah. Were your friends supportive and family? Yeah. That's good. It's so important to have people in your life, because we have our own doubts when we're making tough decisions like this. The last thing you need is someone else pouring their own fears into you when you're about to make a change. So you spent two years in the MFA program. Tell me about how you started writing your books?
[00:12:19] Mary: The MFA program was a way for me to figure out what book I wanted to write first of all, and my advisors would take. I had a manuscript that I had to submit to be accepted in the program, and they said, You have two books here, so decide which one you want to write. I chose one of them, and it was called Qualities of Light when it was published.
And it's about a young girl who, in my tradition of writing about women heroes, has to face a summer where she almost causes the death of her younger brother. And at the same time, she falls in love with this new person on the lake who's her best friend. And it's about deserved happiness.
Do we deserve happiness even in difficult circumstances where we've maybe made a terrible mistake and caused others harm? So I wanted to explore that, and it ended up being a young adult book, but it's readable for adults as well. I just love this character, Molly, the young girl, and her family.
So I went on to write a second book, a sequel, a Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue, about the mother, the pilot mother of that family, and her estranged sister, who has to flee the law because she's framed for murder, and the only sanctuary she has is this sister, whom she's estranged from. She's never met.
So I wanted to play more with that family because they were really close friends of mine by the end of the first book, and I enjoyed that so much. Those two books.
[00:13:47] Aneta: For someone who does not write fiction, I've only written nonfiction. What is the process of creating these characters? What is your process as you're starting? Do you start with a story, a thread, an outline, or is it a character, or is it as you set a theme that you want to explore? What is your own personal process?
[00:14:05] Mary: I love that question. Qualities of light started when I was sitting on the dock of a lake in the Adirondacks, where my family had a home. My grandmother's camp was there, and after she passed, we inherited the property, and I went up there every summer. So I was sitting on the dock looking across the lake, and I saw a glimpse of a water skier away across the lake about a mile away.
With the light glinting off her hair and body, she looked like she was walking, running on water. It was just a momentary illusion of light that transfixed me, really. And it made her into something more like a God, really incredible image. So that image stayed with me, and I know this is going to sound strange. Maybe some people who are listening who write fiction will get it. But this image was my guiding light for the book, and I thought about Molly, my character, as she started to come into being, the longing that she felt as she looked at this character, this skewer across the water, the longing to be that heroic in her own life.
And that was the key to the book. I knew that I had it then; I knew I could build a story around this image. I guess it's the image and the longing. Those are the two things that came together and that created the book for me. Again, I don't know if anybody will understand this, who's listening, but it was such an amazing experience to have that flash of image and then realize what the emotion was behind it. And from there I could build a story.
[00:15:33] Aneta: Yeah. When you're paying attention, inspiration will come in whatever form it chooses to come in, and you just happen to notice that. That's so beautiful. And your book was acclaimed, like you were nominated for a lot of awards, right? For your first book?
[00:15:45] Mary: Yeah. I know
[00:15:46] Aneta: What was that like?
[00:15:49] Mary: Astonishing.
[00:15:50] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:15:51] Mary: When the editor called me from the publisher and she said this has been nominated for a PEN//Faulkner Award and then a Lambda Literary Award. And I thought, what does that even mean, because I know this is going to sound like false modesty, but I didn't follow that part of publishing as much as I followed the idea that I wanted to just get the story good. And so that was really amazing, and I still can't quite believe it, but yay.
[00:16:15] Aneta: And how many additional books did you go on to write?
[00:16:18] Mary: So that was my first novel. I had a lot of food books before that, about 10.
[00:16:24] Aneta: Yes.
[00:16:25] Mary: That was my first novel. And then the sequel, a Women's Guide to Search and Rescue, came next. And I wrote a book about writing called Your Book Starts Here, which won an Award two. That was amazing. And then the last book that I just wrote is called Last Bets.
[00:16:41] Aneta: Tell us a little bit more about that one. What's that about?
[00:16:45] Mary: That takes a complete right turn. Again, I started with an image, so I'm a scuba diver. I was a long-time scuba diver, and I was in the Caribbean, and I was on this island called Bonaire, and I was at this tiki bar with my friends, and this guy was sitting next to me, and he said, I just lost my yacht. And I thought.
[00:17:09] Aneta: Oh, that's curious. So he says that, and that's very curious. I probably would've been like, okay, tell me more.
[00:17:18] Mary: I did, and I asked him how he lost his? Yeah, I thought Shipwreck or somebody stole it. And he said, No, I lost it at backgammon. I thought, what? And then he went on to say that in the Caribbean, there's a select group of people who travel around. I don't know if this is true anymore, but I did some research on the internet when I was writing this book, and I found out that there were,and there are, these gambling clubs that run around the islands, mostly for wealthy people.
And I would never think backgammon would be a game of chance, but evidently it's one of the few games you can't cheat at. It's a game of skill, not luck. All these people love backgammon. It's like their thing. So I thought, what an interesting idea. The idea that you could lose so much on a game of chance, and it wouldn't be something that you could control.
That was an image also. And that led to the idea of writing a book about a woman who was at the end of her chances. And she is a portrait painter, and she can see the future of the people that she paints. She has the paranormal ability, the psychic ability.
So she is going to the island to finish a commission for a wealthy man there. And she gets involved in the backgammon tournaments, and as the story moves along, it comes out that her father knew about her paranormal ability when she was a kid and used it in his own high-stakes gambling games because she could see the board, queen gambit type thing.
[00:18:56] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:18:58] Mary: So she can actually see the board. And because the circumstances around her visit to the island fall apart, she's there without any money. She can't pay the mortgage on her townhome. Everything's going wrong for her. So she decides to get involved in the games again, which she swore she would never do, and she's able to see the board, and she can win lots of money, and then it all backfires on her.
So I wanted to play with that idea of somebody facing a second chance, and then morally, what are they going to do? Are they going to follow their heart and their true self, or are they going to do what they did in the past and cheat to get by? So that was a fabulous book to explore and write.
[00:19:40] Aneta: That is so amazing. Oh my gosh. You just must be so thrilled. Looking back at a time when you weren't sure how it was going to work out, and you still decided to take the chance and move forward doing something that you love. What's next? What else, either with writing fiction or painting, because I know that you have lots of passions. So what does it look like going forward?
[00:20:03] Mary: I think what I'm going to do next over this winter is really focus on my studio. I have a little art studio that I love, and I've been working on some paintings. I usually paint in the winter inside and paint in the summer outside. That's my style. And again, the writing has taken over for the art, and I watched this happen again when the books were published, just like there's such a momentum around publication that you have to write it for a while as an author, and when it passes and things settle down a little bit, you can look at your life and see what you missed.
And one of the things I've really missed is paintings. So I think my next thing is going to be to channel my creativity in that direction and work with color and form, and light during our long New Hampshire winters, which are a little gray. And that will be a way for me to keep my spirits up and take a rest break from writing for a while. And I'm thinking about the next book. I have two ideas, but I'm not there yet. I need the incubation time, I guess you'd call it.
[00:21:05] Aneta: Yeah. Do you spend a lot of time, or I guess, or does it depend on each novel? Like with an idea? Do you just ruminate on it, meditate on it for a bit?
[00:21:14] Mary: I'm slow. I'm really slow. My qualities of light took about six years. A woman's guide to search and rescue took 10 years, and Last Bets took three years. So I'm getting faster, but I'm still a person who likes to, I don't know. I like to get it right. I like to get it as close to right as I can.
I hate to say perfect because it's never perfect, but I need to spend enough time with it. I don't like being rushed. I realized that in publishing, it's hard because the next book is the big thing. You're supposed to be working on the next book and get it out there soon.
But I've never really liked that idea. I wanted to just allow myself the time to do it the way I want to do it feel really satisfied. 10 years later, would I love this book still? Would I be proud of it? And that's my criteria.
[00:22:04] Aneta: That's great. And clearly, your novels have won awards, and you are doing something right when it comes to that approach and that level of excellence. On your website that you write about women heroes, not obvious ones, not immediate ones, but women who are searching for freedom and worth in their lives despite complicated, risky circumstances or a difficult past. Is that a thread that you think will continue in most of your novels?
[00:22:29] Mary: Yes, women heroes are one of my main themes that I write about in exploring all ages. So I like intergenerational relationships in a story. I always have a young person, either a teenager in their twenties, who inadvertently saves the older people. I also like the idea of women working in different generations collaboratively. We're not having to be separate anymore. We're a unit, older people and younger people learning from each other, and the younger people often rescuing or saving the older people, that's a real hot theme for me in all my books.
[00:23:05] Aneta: So good. And as you look back on your life's journey, any advice for someone who maybe has made their decision, they're in a career, maybe they've been in their career for a long time, maybe they're in their forties or 50, like you are, and they think that it's too late. What would you say to someone who's like, It's too late. I can't make a change now. Too much to give up.
[00:23:30] Mary: It's hard, if you have kids and you have a life that you've created and you know you're going to risk some of the stability. For me, it was a thing where I had to look at the stability and how much satisfaction I was getting out of it. So I wrote down a pros and cons list. This was a good technique someone taught me, of all the things I was really satisfied with in my life, all the things that I was not satisfied with in my life, and look at them and see how the weight was one side to the other. If the dissatisfaction or the longing was so great and it was eroding my satisfaction with things I did have, then I knew that was a call for me.
I had to follow that call. And even though I was risking things, if I had a supportive community, my family, my friends, then they would help me leap. Yes, I would lose stuff. You're going to lose stuff when you make a change, but for me, the things I gained were so important and so valuable. I didn't even know what I was missing.
That's the thing. I think maybe I advise people, you don't even know what you're missing, so maybe take a little step and try and see. It's scary, but it's so worth it.
[00:24:41] Aneta: Such great advice. So how can folks find you? How can they find your books and learn more about all the great things that you're doing?
[00:24:50] Mary: My website, which you've mentioned so kindly, is marycarrollmoore.com, and that's two R's, two L', and two O's, and Carol Moore. Mary Carol Moore dot com. And then I'm on Substack. I have a weekly free writing newsletter called Your Weekly Writing Exercise, which is basically set up to encourage and sustain writing practice or any creative practice.
And that's free. And it's on marycarrollmoore.substack.com, so they can find me in both places. My books are online and in all the bookstores, Barnes and Noble, bookshop.org, Amazon, wherever you want to look for them. So I would be delighted to hear from readers. You can contact me via my website or via my Substack.
If you happen to come upon one of my books and you like it or don't like it or whatever, you have questions about, I'd love to have a correspondence going. I like that with readers.
[00:25:43] Aneta: That's so good. And for your Substack, is it for folks who are interested in writing fiction and nonfiction?
[00:25:48] Mary: Yeah, it's all kinds of writing. And also because I'm a painter, I include creativity as a theme in there. So, some issues I might work on are how art and writing connect, and how having multiple types of creative pursuits really is. They feed each other. My writing and my art actually support each other back and forth, so I like to go into topics like that as well.
[00:26:12] Aneta: That sounds like a great one. I'm excited to subscribe to myself and could always use some more guidance and inspiration. Mary, so I ask everyone a question at the end that's tied to the title of the podcast. What does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:26:28] Mary: I love that quote by Diane Ackerman, by the way, because she's one of my favorite writers. For me, living the width of my life means taking risks and trying new things, no matter what age or circumstance you're in. That first flying lesson I took at age 70 was very scary to do, even with my mother, who was the pilot.
But I think that what I learned during that, facing my fear and actually realizing my strength, that's the thing that gives me the width, not the shallowness, but the width comes from that courage to expand my strength and face my fear. And like in Ackerman's quote, I don't want to regret anything when I come to the end of my life. I want to have taken the leap and tried with what my heart wanted me to do, what I was called to do.
[00:27:15] Aneta: Beautiful response. Mary, it's just been a delight getting to know you. I'm so excited to read your books and to subscribe to your Substack. And thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:27:25] Mary: Thank you so much.
[00:27:27] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.