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 distanced herself from the church and only attends occasionally now.
Long Bio
Long Bio
Mette Marie Ivie was born ninth of eleven children. 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 German 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 married in 1990 and had five children from 1994-2002.
Her first published works were in the young adult genre: The Monster In Me (2002), Mira, Mirror (2004), The Princess and the Hound (2006) and other books. 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. She experienced a serious bout of depression and recurring problems with suicidal ideation, which she still battles off and on and writes about on her Substack Kicking and Screaming (metteh.substack.com).
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, Mette was formally diagnosed with autism and now writes frequently about the experience of growing up autistic, 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 and supervisor in the financial world after swift retraining and a new degree as a CFP. She is still writing, and new books will come out eventually!