In 1953 she married John Updike, a Harvard student, who she met during an art class her senior year.
After his graduation, they both studied art at Oxford University's Ruskin School of Drawing, where their first child, Elizabeth, was born.
They lived in New York for two years while John wrote for the New Yorker and then moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1957, where they raised their four children, Elizabeth, David, Michael, and Miranda.
After her divorce, she worked for Atlantic Monthly reading poetry and studied at Montserrat College of Art.
[7] Mary was a popular landscape painter as well as being active in the civil rights movement, participating in one of the Selma marches.