About
About
Short Bio
Short Bio
Mette Ivie Harrison (now Mette Marie Ivie) is the national best-selling, award-winning author of The Bishop’s Wife, published in 2014 with Soho Press. She holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton, is divorced and now works in the financial industry. Before writing adult mysteries, she wrote numerous YA fantasies, including the award-winning and acclaimed Mira, Mirror, and The Princess and the Hound. For nearly fifty years, she was an active, believing Mormon, but has now separated from that life.
Long Bio
Long Bio
Mette Marie Ivie was born ninth of eleven children to a large, strict Mormon family. She grew up on a farmhouse in central New Jersey before moving to Utah for high school. She spent her sophomore year at a German Gymnasium and began taking college courses when she returned to Utah. At age seventeen, she was awarded the “Ezra Taft Benson Scholarship” at Brigham Young University, an honor reserved for only twelve young Mormon women and men. At age nineteen, Harrison graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in German in 1990, only two years after high school, and went to Princeton on full scholarship for a PhD program, which she finished in 1995. She studied German Expressionism and Dada, as well as eighteenth century women’s Bildungsromane, topics which inform her interests to this day. She married in 1990 and had five children very close together.
In 1997, Harrison began to work seriously toward her lifelong dream of becoming an author. She wrote twenty novels over the next several years, with the 21st garnering a contract with Holiday House, The Monster In Me, published in 2002. She wrote young adult for many years, publishing Mira, Mirror, The Princess and the Hound, The Princess and the Bear, The Princess and the Snowbird, Tris and Izzie and The Rose Throne. During this time she was busy with five children and full activity in the Mormon church. In 2005, she lost her sixth child, Mercy, at birth, and this changed everything: her views on God, the after-life, and slowly, inexorably, her belief in Mormonism.
In 2014, The Bishop’s Wife, an adult mystery set in Mormon, Utah and questioning Mormon gender norms, came out with Soho Press to much acclaim nationally, and considerable controversy locally. Four more books in that series have since been published (His Right Hand, For Time and All Eternities, Not Of This Fold, and The Prodigal Daughter), each focusing on different controversial topics–LGBTQ+ Mormons, polygamous Mormons, racial issues, and youth homelessness and rape culture among Mormons. Harrison has also published other Mormon-themed books for By Common Consent (The Book of Laman, The Book of Abish, The Women’s Book of Mormon Volumes 1 and 2, and Vampires in the Temple, Genealogy of Werewolves and Resurrection Rites).
In 2017, she was formally diagnosed with autism and now writes frequently about the experience of growing up autistic in a largely autistic family, late diagnosis for autistic women, masking, autistic burnout, and many other topics on Substack and Medium.
In January of 2019, Harrison stepped away from formal association with the Mormon Church. In 2020 onward, she was involved in an ongoing divorce that was finally settled in 2023. Now Mette Marie Ivie again, she works works full-time as a securities trader in the financial world. She writes in the very little spare time she has, but her future as a professional and published writer is uncertain. There are several Linda Wallheim books, including a devastating and painful final one, that may be published at some point.