Mary Dean Cason
Author/Storyteller
New Release
Daughters of Eve
Set in the fractured landscape of 1968, Daughters of Eve asks what it costs a woman to live fully—and what it costs her family when she cannot.
Fifteen years after her devout Catholic mother is found dead with pills, booze, and an undisclosed pregnancy on board, Nellie Locke returns to her North Carolina home—newly married, newly pregnant, and newly haunted.
A chance encounter with her mother’s obstetrician reopens old wounds, and Nellie begins pulling at threads others have spent decades holding tight. What she discovers is a woman she barely recognizes: a gifted artist trapped in a collision with the budding women's movement, marriage, motherhood, and a Catholic Church impervious to change.
Daughters of Eve is a story about the secrets mothers keep, the grief daughters carry, and whether truth is ever truly a comfort.
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Mary Dean Cason grew up in North Carolina, where she knew anything Eudora Welty wrote beat out a Nancy Drew mystery any day of the week. Educated by nuns in the heart of the Bible Belt—a curious perch from which to observe the transformations of the 1960s—she came to view the world with wry sympathies and a tenderness for human foibles.
After moving to Chicago, Mary Dean stumbled into and out of a variety of careers—flight attendant, occupational therapist, medical writer, and, best of all, mother—providing material aplenty for her fiction
As well as Daughters of Eve, she is the author of What Solomon Saw and Other Stories. She holds a master’s degree in public administration and is a graduate of the University of Chicago Writers Studio, where she won the 2008 prize for fiction.
A passionate storyteller both on and off the page, Mary Dean has been featured at Chicago live-lit events, including Story Sessions and This Much Is True. She is also a co-founder of the San Miguel Storytelling Festival in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Mary Dean lives in Chicago and continues to write fiction inspired by the people, places and everyday catastrophes that shape our lives.
About the Author
Other Works
What Solomon Saw and Other Stories
Eleven short stories that delve into the lives of women and girls in the American South, Chicago, New York, and Europe, exploring themes of family, love, loss, and identity with a blend of humor and heartbreak. The title story features a young girl's coming-of-age, while other tales delve into infidelity, grief, and the enduring power of parental love, often with vivid, Southern-infused settings and witty dialogue.
Stortytellers' True Stories About Love
Storytellers' True Stories about Love, Volume II continues the highly successful Volume 1 with a collection of thirty wonderfully composed true stories told live that capture love in its many forms--love of romantic partners, parents, children, and friends, including the story "The Verb to Mother" by Mary Dean delivered at multiple venues in the Midwest.