Mary Tyler Moore as Medium, Memoir https://ift.tt/GDHWmxo
As a child growing up in the 1970s, there was no disputing the power of television. For me, television was a babysitter, an escape, and a roadmap for the type of woman I might one day become. And like Julie Marie Wade, author of The Mary Years, who watched reruns on Nick at Nite, I was an avid viewer of the Mary Tyler Moore Show for its portrayal of a smart career woman determined to make it on her own. Wade’s The Mary Years offers a deep dive into her personal connection to the iconic show in episodic pieces detailing her experiences with work, friendship, and love.
The book takes the reader from the opening credits of the show to the closing credits, offering stories of Wade’s challenges and triumphs juxtaposed with observations about lessons learned from Moore, ending when Wade reaches the age Moore was when the show ended. The structure is clever and makes for a quick read, even if some of the associations being made between Wade’s life and Moore’s feel like a stretch at times. In making those associative leaps, Wade offers up a vivid account of her attempts to break from her strict upbringing and process her experiences as a queer teen in the 1990s in a social environment that was less than accepting.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s theme song asks, “How will you make it on your own?” The book’s hybrid structure of essays, lists, and loose-leaf inserts (offering background on the characters in her life and in Moore’s) reinforces the sense of discrete events that build to Wade’s own version of “making it”. Wade writes with charm and evocative prose about the appeal of the show. Of hearing the opening theme song, she writes:
“Whenever I heard this sound – more urgent than a playground whistle, or a pistol fired at the start of a race – I sprinted toward the kitchen. There I propped my elbows on a placemat, cupped my face with my hands, embraced the bad posture of peering. I leaned so close to the television I could have kissed our heroine on her grainy cheek, squatted beside her on the passenger seat. For all my life thereafter, I wanted to ride shotgun to that story.”
Wade’s love for Moore is platonic, if worshipful, but she finds glimmers of her queerness in her attraction to other figures on television including Roma Downy and Jane Seymour.
In the process of riding shotgun with Moore’s story, she seeks out role models who resemble Moore in their independence, including a neighbor, Linda, who acts as a surrogate mother encouraging Wade and her best friend to be true to themselves, and ends up becoming a lifelong friend.
As Wade grows up, she quotes lines from the show to potential employers, takes a ratty fold out couch so she can have one just like Moore, and, as a professor, shows students (none of whom recognize Moore) a picture of Moore as a possible prompt for an ekphrastic poem.
We watch as she tries and rejects being the object of male desire and as she flees home with the woman who would become her wife and finds her tribe as a professor. Along the way she explicates the process we all use when we look to others to become more ourselves. When her students quiz her about how she figured out what she wanted to do as a career, she writes:
“They are looking at me with such anticipation, waiting for me to pass down a piece of my own story, which might somehow be useful to them as they continue assembling theirs. And how can I deny them anything, my students, when I have spent my whole life with a tiny Steno pad in hand, a pencil tucked behind my ear?”
The Mary Years is an engaging account of Wade’s study of a beloved television figure and the impact that had on her life.
NONFICTION The Mary Years By Julie Marie Wade
Texas Review Press
Published November 18, 2024
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