Mary Norris

Best-selling New York Times author and renowned New Yorker copyeditor—the Comma Queen herself—Mary Norris is again delighting readers with her wit, knowledge, and exploration of language in Greek To Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen. In this new memoir, Norris relates her life-long love of Greece, her quest to learn the language and master the mythology, and her travels through the Greek Isles in search of herself.

When Mary Norris was in fifth grade, the nuns at her Catholic school were offering a Saturday Latin class and she wanted to join. Her father refused, and she missed the chance. It wasn’t until she got to college a decade later and took a course taught by the classicist Froma Zeitlin, where she read the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, that her desire to learn a dead language flared again. A handful of years later, while working in the copy department of the New Yorker, Mary told her boss Ed Stringham that she wanted to go to Greece. Stringham, it so happened, had a great love for Greece and had visited the country multiple times. He encouraged her to take Greek language courses—paid for by the magazine—and her obsession took flight.

Greek To Me is a brilliant, witty, and moving memoir. Norris’s love of words inspires her treks through Greece—both the language and the country. Join her on her journey in Greek To Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen as she navigates from Alpha to Omega.

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Mary Norris worked for the New Yorker as a copy editor and query proofreader for more than thirty years. Her first book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, is a New York Times best-selling book about her years at the New Yorker. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Norris now lives in New York and Rockaway.