About Me

"Where did your name come from?" It's a question I've heard as long as I can remember. The answer is that my mom and dad made it up. As they tell the story, they took "M-a-r" from Marie, which is my mother's name, and "f-e" from Ferguson, our family name, and put it together to make "Marfe." It's pronounced Mar-FAYE. (Click here to hear me say it.) When I started studying French in 8th grade, I learned that putting an acute accent—a little slash mark—above an "e" in a word indicates that the "e" should be pronounced like a long "a." I added an acute accent above the "e" in my name and became "Marfé." So there's a little bit of self-invention in my name, too.

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. We lived across the street from my Uncle Dub and Aunt Sissy, who gave me my first haircut and taught me to dance the hokey-pokey. Aunt Sissy still lives in that same house and is in her early 90s now. When I was about four, my mom, dad, and I and my new baby sister, Karen, moved to Jacksonville, Florida. One of my favorite memories of living there is when my mom read the book Bambi aloud to Karen and me. We sat on the sofa with Mom in the middle, and we all three cried together at the sad parts.

My father worked as a salesman, and our family moved around a lot. After about three years in Florida we lived briefly in Des Moines, Iowa. Then we moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where my youngest sister, Sherri, was born. I was eight then, and I absolutely adored carrying Sherri around and dressing her up. About four years later we settled in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where I went to Clarkston High School and had an amazing English teacher, Mrs. Betty Ellington. Mrs. Ellington helped drill the rules of grammar and composition into my head, and to this day I would rather bite my tongue than use a subjective pronoun after a preposition. (For those of you who are interested, this means one should never, ever, say or write "between you and I." Why? Because "between" is a preposition, which requires an objective pronoun. "I" is a subjective pronoun. "Me" is an objective pronoun. So the phrase should be "between you and me." And between you and me, I should move on before I bore you to pieces.)

Moving that often was challenging. I'm pretty open and talkative, though, so it usually didn't take me too long to make new friends. My mom also helped me and my sisters through all the moves, just by being there for us. Another thing that helped me through all the moves? Reading! My parents subscribed to Reader's Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers. A new volume arrived by mail every couple of months, and each volume contained condensed versions of four or five books. I can still remember how excited I was when a new volume arrived. I loved opening the box, inhaling that wonderful new book smell, and flipping through the pages before deciding which story to read first. The series introduced me to Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, The Good Earth, and many more great books. When I got older I read the full-length version of many of them and enjoyed them more than ever.

When I was in 10th grade my family moved very briefly to New Hampshire, where my southern accent earned me the nickname "Lamb Chop." For some reason the kids thought this was a southern expression, which puzzled me. I'd never even eaten a lamb chop. Just as I was getting used to the coldest weather I had ever experienced, we picked up and moved again, this time to Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Throughout my childhood, every summer my parents and sisters and I piled into the car and drove back to Memphis to visit Aunt Sissy and other relatives.

After high school I went to Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, where I planned to major in history and then go on to law school. I ended up majoring in English and ditching my law school plans. After graduation I lucked into a job as an editorial assistant in the children's book department at Charles Scribner's Sons, a book publishing company in New York City. The job barely paid me enough to pay for my half of the rent of the teeny tiny apartment in Brooklyn I shared with a college friend, but I absolutely loved it. Imagine being paid to work with books—and type and file and answer phones and run errands. One of my responsibilities was to read the "slush pile"—manuscripts submitted by writers hoping to get their children's book published. If I liked a manuscript I passed it on to my boss for her consideration. The saddest part of my job was sending out rejection letters. Having one's work rejected sure isn't fun, but it's part of being a writer. I know that now from personal experience!

I met a wonderful man in New York and we got married. Eventually we moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where I worked first as a copy editor and then as a staff writer for Time-Life Books. At the time, Time-Life published excellent book series on all sorts of topics, ranging from the Civil War to cooking to ancient civilizations. Some of the best editors and writers in the business worked there, and I was extremely fortunate to work with them and learn from them. I began writing for children when Time-Life opened a children's book division. After my own children, Allison and David, were born, I decided to work from home as a freelance writer. I've been doing that ever since. For more information on how I became a writer, see my Q & A page.

Writing and researching don't take up all my time, of course. I also read a lot for pleasure, I sing with a choral society, and I love to cook and go for long walks and hikes. When my kids were little I coached their soccer teams, until all the players knew more about soccer than I did. That didn't take more than a season or two. Now Allison is a college graduate, and David is in college. My husband and I live in northern Virginia, and we love it when they come home and hang out with us.