About
Mette Marie Ivie (who publishes under Mette Ivie Harrison) 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 (1995), is an Ironman triathlete and All-American competitot, and has five living children. 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 in 2019, she stepped away from formal affiliation from the church, in 2020 separated from her Mormon husband of 30 years, and retrained as a securities trader in the financial world. She continues to think of herself as “Mormon” in a broader, cultural sense of the term and continues to write fiction and non-fiction related to Mormonism and not related to Mormonism.
Long Bio
Mette Marie Ivie (who publishes under her formerly married name of Harrison) 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 at age twenty-three, shortly before the birth of her second child.
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 2013, she published a memoir Ironmom about training for an Ironman amidst her grief. Then 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, Mormons racial issues, and youth homelessness and rape culture among Mormons. From 2015-2018 Harrison published a weekly blog on Huffington Post about Mormon issues, some critical, and many positive. 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, and Vampires in the Temple series.)
She is currently working on a raw and rather angry memoir about grief called Mercy and a new Linda Wallheim book, as well as The Sycamore Tree, a sprawling Mormon family drama set at Bear Lake as a large family get together every five years for a reunion.