About Marylou
Marylou is a graduate of the Syracuse University School of Journalism. She lives in the Pocono Lake Region of Pennsylvania with her husband Art and dog Sadie, who’s a character in her newest book. When she’s not writing, thinking about writing, or feeling guilty for not writing, she reads inside by the fire or outside on the pontoon boat (depending on the season), memorizes lines for plays, walks the dog, and overthinks.
Marylou Ambrose is a writer, actor, and author of the cozy mystery novel, Your Number’s Up.
For more than 35 years, she worked as a freelance writer and editor for books, magazines, and newspapers. With a specialty in medical subjects, she wasted a lot of time looking up symptoms and wondering when her creativity died.
She brought it back to life in 1999 when she and a friend founded a community theater company, The Lakeside Players. Between them, they’d acted in four plays, but swinging from wildly confident to scared shitless, they pulled it off. They even founded a professional company, Tonylou Productions. Both companies are still in business today. The duo also wrote 18 plays, most of them mysteries, which laid the groundwork for Marylou’s first novel.
But it took her a while to get there.
The rocky road to Your Number’s Up started in 2008 when Marylou’s 89-year-old mother Lucy moved in – only 5 months after her son Travis left for his first year of college. Lucy stayed for 11 years, needing more and more care as she approached the century mark and developed dementia. As a catharsis, Marylou wrote her play The Dementia Monologues, a finalist in the 2018 Shawnee Original Playwrights’ Contest.
Lucy entered assisted living at age 100. Then nine months later, the pandemic hit. It was like going from one lockdown to another.
With time on her hands and ideas in her head, Marylou decided to write that novel she’d been thinking about for years. It’s uncanny how much Marie and Rose, the main characters in Your Number’s Up, resemble Marylou and Lucy.