Mary F. Pols

Mary Pols is the author of “Accidentally on Purpose: The True Tale of a Happy Single Mother,” originally published in June 2008 by Ecco/Harper Collins, now available in paperback from Harper Perennial. A native of Maine, Pols has spent most of her professional life as a journalist in California.She reviews film for Time.com and MSN.Movies. For many years, she was the movie critic for the Contra Costa Times, and her reviews could be found in the San Jose Mercury News and the Oakland Tribune. Pols has written for Time Magazine, The New York Times, Self, Wondertime, MoreIntelligentLife.com, Glamour.com, the Times of London, Red Magazine and Grazia. Her memoir was optioned by BermanBraun and has been developed for a television series by CBS, airing now on Monday nights at 8:30, right after “How I Met Your Mother.”Prior to becoming a movie critic she worked as a news reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times and Los Angeles Daily News. Her journalism awards include a first place prize from the ASNE, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, for column writing. The highlight of her news writing career was traveling to Ireland to write about the Northern Ireland Peace agreement. Having grandparents named Dolan, Duffy and Sinnott probably had something to do with her fascination with the subject.A graduate of Duke University (with a BA in art history) and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Pols was a Knight Fellow at Stanford in 2005-2006. She has taught movie criticism at UC Berkeley.The youngest of six children, Pols grew up with a philosophy professor for a father and a mother who put more energy into her studies of art history than 20 of her fellow students at Bowdoin College combined. Edward Pols gave his daughter C.S. Lewis and Edith Wharton while Eileen Pols gave her Pauline Kael and tours of seemingly every church and museum from Florence to Connemara.Pols lives in Northern California with her son Dolan and Androscoggin the Maine Coon Cat. Matt lives close by. She’s working on her next book, a novel.