Retirement certainly didn’t put the brakes on former ABC Coast FM radio personality Mary-Lou Stephens, who was best-known for her drive-time segment.
Nine years on, the local radio announcer-turned-author has published three best-selling novels and her fourth is set to hit bookstores in 2026.
Her fifth novel — off the back of two, two-book deals with HarperCollins — is being ‘day-dreamt’ into existence and is slated for release in 2028.
Mary-Lou’s first novel, The Last of the Apple Blossom, begins in 1967 during Tasmania’s worst bushfires; The Chocolate Factory, set in early-20th century Hobart, is about Quakers, espionage and, of course, chocolate; and The Jam Maker, set in Hobart when it was the jam-making capital of Australia, tells the story of Henry Jones and the rise of IXL through the eyes of an entrepreneurial female jam-maker circa 1900s.
However, as Mary-Lou candidly tells salt, the road to becoming a novelist has been “bumpy”. She confesses to having three “failed” novels sitting in her bottom drawer, which writer friends have encouraged her to view more kindly as ‘practice novels’.
The Tasmania-born author certainly took the road less travelled to forge a life, and a writing career, for herself on the Sunshine Coast.
A passionate musician, Mary-Lou had been gigging in Sydney, but when her last band broke up, an ABC announcer friend offered her a lifeline — why not go to radio school?
She did, going on to work in radio in Tamworth and Townsville before landing her dream job with the ABC as music director and an announcer at Coast FM. There Mary-Lou worked with the late John Stokes who was legendary for his enthusiasm and genuine interest in human beings.
He saw something in Mary-Lou that she didn’t see then: a writer.
Mary-Lou says John encouraged her to write about a music lover’s tour of the US she did in 2001. John was so impressed with what she’d penned he suggested to the Sunshine Coast Daily’s chief-of-staff at the time, Bill Hoffman, that Mary-Lou write a column for the newspaper. Bill invited Mary-Lou to send in some sample columns but told her bluntly: “I’ll see what I think but I’ll probably tell you you can’t write because most people can’t.”
Mary-Lou submitted her sample and within half an hour she was signed up to write a weekly column. “So that’s what got me into writing, I wrote the column for four-and-a-half years,” she says.
“Before that, I’d been a songwriter, but I never thought I’d write novels. In my job at the ABC I interviewed many authors and most of them knew from a young age that’s what they wanted to do.
“It never crossed my mind until I got into the habit of writing regularly. Then I started writing short stories and then novels and on it went.”
Mary-Lou’s dream job, however, soon turned into a nightmare when the music radio station restructured after she’d been there for just a year.
Mary-Lou says the restructure was “really, really horrible” and that ultimately the ABC drove her to embrace meditation.
While still working at the ABC, her memoir, Sex Drugs and Meditation, was published by Pan Macmillan (2013). The narrative is cleverly structured around Mary-Lou’s first ever Vipassana ‘sit’, which was a 10-day silent meditation retreat at Pomona.
Each day of the sit, she faced flashbacks to her past life as an actor, musician, addict (food, heroin and alcohol) and her evangelical upbringing as well as her then-current work nightmare.
Ultimately, though, it’s an uplifting story, as the tagline attests: How one woman changed her life, saved her job and found a husband.
Her memoir was inspired by the case studies Mary-Lou read in self-help books but confesses she herself never did the exercises.
However, after her transformative 10-day sit, Mary-Lou realised her life could potentially be a case study people might be interested in reading.
“The thing about case studies, and why we love them so much, is because it is the hero’s journey, which is the elemental story form.”
“It’s what most Hollywood movies are based on, most books are based on. You know, the hero’s journey, the ordinary life, the challenge, the call, the conflict, the black moment, all that kind of stuff.”
Mary-Lou thought she’d easily be able to transition to becoming a published fiction author but that wasn’t the case.
During her career at the ABC, Mary-Lou took a six-month sabbatical and simply wrote and wrote and wrote. That would become the first of the manuscripts languishing in her bottom drawer.
While still at the ABC, Mary-Lou started drafting what would become her first published novel, The Last of the Apple Blossom (2021). She was mentored by Monica McInerney, a prolific contemporary author loved for her novels set in Australia and Ireland, which typically explore complex family relationships, secrets, grief and personal transformation.
Mary-Lou describes Monica as a “hard task mistress” who made her complete six full drafts before she would assess it, and 10 drafts before she was allowed to shop it around to literary agents.
Mary-Lou was knocked back by agents and had plenty of rejections from publishers but she dusted herself off and kept submitting. Eventually Mary-Lou had three publishers interested and went with the one with the deal on the table: HarperCollins.
Mary-Lou left radio in 2016 and embarked on her next journey with husband Ken, which would combine two loves — slow travel and writing.
Mary-Lou explains she and Ken are low-income earners, yet their lives are enriched by slow travel, which entails living as long as their visas allow (usually three months) in countries with a lower cost of living than Australia.
The couple has ‘slow travelled’ to Borneo Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines and Uruguay (the latter country turned out to be more expensive than Australia) and, after a brief Queensland sojourn, has their sights set on Albania later this year.
Mary-Lou’s travels also sparked an idea which she’s woven into the fabric of her upcoming fourth novel, which is about Australia’s first legal casino: West Point in Hobart. Growing up, Mary-Lou recalls the casino was “massively divisive” and led to a referendum in Tasmania in 1968.
“My mother was firmly against it. My father was part of the legal team putting it together. My older sister became a croupier, a Ladybird as they were called, the year it opened.”
“I remember her practising with dummy chips and cards at the dining room table. How my mother put up with it, I don’t know. It split a lot of families, but it was also incredibly exciting.”
The novel has a dual timeline, starting with the opening of the West Point Hotel Casino, and another timeline that begins in 1939, with the opening of Australia’s most glamorous hotel, the West Point Riviera. Without revealing too much, the 1939-1940 timeline transports the reader to Uruguay, where Mary-Lou uncovered some fascinating history that happened there in the Second World War, and she managed to combine the two ideas.
While travel inspires her, Mary-Lou says there’s something about home, where she was born and raised, that really anchors her fiction.
“Tasmania has become hot in fiction. It really makes me laugh because when I was growing up there, it was the daggiest place in the world. No one would ever think of setting a book in Tasmania. But now it’s become a thing.”