Mary Tabor - Who By Fire

Mary L. Tabor is the author of the award-winning “Who by Fire”. The story is told by Robert, Lena’s husband, as he attempts to understand her affair with Isaac, an affair that he has become aware of after her death. He imagines the story of his wife and her lover. Robert the narrator is trying to know himself in the story he is writing as he tells his imagined version of his wife’s betrayal. The story becomes a paradoxical tale of his own undoing that he comes to realize by telling it. In the epigraph to the novel, Robert says, “Life has a way of raveling. Story discovers how it happened. That is the fiction.”

Mary graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland with a BA in English (’66), from Oberlin College with an MAT in English and education (’67), from Ohio State University with an MFA in Creative Writing (’99). She went back to college for that last degree the year she turned 50 after a 16-year career in corporate America, a senior executive, director of public affairs writing for the oil industry’s trade association, landing her in both Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who of American Women. Mary published her first book of fiction The Woman Who Never Cooked at age 60.

She’s also written “(Re)Making Love: A Memoir” that tells the complex story of her marriage and separation. From her website: “It’s a story of the good, the bad and the foolish after Del said, oh, so Greta Garbo, “I need to live alone” pulls no punches. Mary tells the story of her four-year separation from Del, her Internet dating, the sex, the falling in and out of “love,” and the redemption of her marriage against all odds. She rediscovered life, sex and love after sixty.”