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The Novelist Who Found Her Creative Breakthroughs at barre3
Mary Berman has spent most of her life in her head. As a novelist, that’s largely the point—the long, solitary hours of thinking, drafting, and revising that eventually, if you show up enough times, produce a book. But somewhere between the barre and the 15-pound weights, she discovered something her elementary school gym teachers would never have predicted: movement wasn’t the opposite of thinking. It was the thing that made thinking possible.
Her debut novel, Until Death, is a darkly funny, genre-bending story about grief, dementia, and the romance you swore you’d never let yourself have. It’s the fifth novel she’s written, the culmination of years of rejection, resilience, and showing up anyway. And through all of it, there was barre3 Rittenhouse.
From the Page to the Studio
By her own admission, Mary spent most of her life “inhabiting the space of the mind more than the body”—convinced that exercise was something that happened to other people.
That changed when she found barre3. “I want to give barre3 a tremendous amount of credit,” she says. “It has turned me into a person who likes working out. My elementary school gym teachers would literally not believe this.”
The Body Knows What the Brain Forgets
There’s a common assumption among writers that creativity lives entirely in the mind—that the work of thinking and the work of moving are fundamentally separate pursuits. Mary doesn’t buy it anymore.
“There’s a way to make the physical act of writing go faster,” she says, “which is to hunch over your laptop for the longest possible stretch of time. But there’s no way to make the thinking go faster. Except there is. And it’s to get up and move around.”
For Mary, barre3 has become the place where her mind gets room to breathe. Away from the page and the pressure of a blank doc, her thoughts loosen. Ideas surface. Creative blocks dissolve. “When I’m in the studio, my mind can drift—it’s lubricated, it’s given room to percolate, it can see past roadblocks in a way that it can’t while it’s staring at the page,” she says. “I often have breakthroughs while at barre3.”
There’s also something to be said, she notes, for the particular relief of having someone else tell you exactly what to do for 45 minutes.
Showing Up Is the Work
Until Death is Mary’s debut novel. It is also the fifth novel she has written.
The four before it never found a publisher. There were hundreds of agent queries, hundreds of short story submissions, and what she describes as thousands of rejections. The publishing world is not for the faint of heart—and Mary has the scar tissue to prove it.
But somewhere along the way, she found a framework for understanding the long arc of creative work. And it came, unexpectedly, from the studio.
“When I started barre3 Signature, I was using three-pound weights,” she says. “Now I use sixes. When I started b3 Strength, I started with twelves, couldn’t handle it, and dropped back to tens. Now I use fifteens. I would never have thought that I could get up to 15-pound weights. And now I’m like, wow—over the long arc of time, I can actually see a path to the seventeen-point-fives.”
The parallel to writing, she says, is exact. “With writing, one of the things I have learned through experience is that you will get to the end if you just keep showing up. There’s no question. All you have to do is show up enough times and do a little tiny bit of work every time, and eventually you will get to the end of your creative project.”
What surprised her most was discovering that the relationship runs both ways. The resilience she’d built through years of publishing rejection made her stronger on the mat. And the physical practice of showing up—of trusting the process even when progress is invisible—made her a better writer.
A Constant in the Chaos
Between developing the idea for Until Death in the summer of 2023 and its release this spring, Mary’s life looked something like this: two job changes, an engagement, a wedding, a signed agent, a book deal, and about a dozen rounds of edits.
“No matter what chaos was going on in my personal or professional life, I knew the studio would be there for me,” she says. “Even during the busiest, worst, ugliest periods of that time, I knew that if I could claw my way to the studio for the 45 minutes of class, I would leave feeling at least one percent more settled.”
That trust—the knowledge that the studio would always be waiting—became its own form of stability. Not just physically, but emotionally. A place where the outside noise quieted and the only thing Mary had to do was show up and move.
Until Death
Until Death follows Ophelia, a woman who returns to her hometown to move her mother, who has dementia, into care. Her parents had a miserable marriage, and Ophelia long ago swore off marriage herself. But with her mother declining and her best friend walking down the aisle, that conviction is starting to feel a lot less certain.
“The premise already has the horror and the romance baked in,” Mary explains. “The horror from the dementia, and the romance because whenever anyone in a novel says ‘I’m never getting married,’ well… you know where that’s going to go.”
And the humor? That, she says, comes from the dementia itself. “All a person with dementia ever does is stuff you would never expect. So Ophelia’s out here like, ‘Why is my mother hiding sandwiches behind the window curtains? Why is she walking up the highway at three o’clock in the morning? Also, how is it that she’s lost her whole damn mind and yet she still won’t get off my case about finding a man?’”
It’s a book about grief and love and the challenge of caring for a parent—told with the kind of dark, precise humor that makes you laugh and then feel a little guilty about it. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of book you’d expect from someone who spent years showing up, lifting heavier, and trusting the process.
Come Celebrate With Us
Until Death is available now. If you’re in Philadelphia, here’s how to celebrate with Mary and the barre3 Rittenhouse community:
- In-Studio Book Signing: May 30–31 at barre3 Rittenhouse
- barre3 Rittenhouse Book Club: June 25 (Mary will be leading the discussion)
Pick up your copy of Until Death here.
Inspired by Mary’s story? Take a class at barre3 Rittenhouse or try barre3 online free for 14 days—and see what showing up can do for you.
Mary Berman has spent most of her life in her head. As a novelist, that’s largely the point—the long, solitary hours of thinking, drafting, and revising that eventually, if you show up enough times, produce a book. But somewhere between the barre and the 15-pound weights, she discovered something her elementary school gym teachers would never have predicted: movement wasn’t the opposite of thinking. It was the thing that made thinking possible.
Her debut novel, Until Death, is a darkly funny, genre-bending story about grief, dementia, and the romance you swore you’d never let yourself have. It’s the fifth novel she’s written, the culmination of years of rejection, resilience, and showing up anyway. And through all of it, there was barre3 Rittenhouse.
From the Page to the Studio
By her own admission, Mary spent most of her life “inhabiting the space of the mind more than the body”—convinced that exercise was something that happened to other people.
That changed when she found barre3. “I want to give barre3 a tremendous amount of credit,” she says. “It has turned me into a person who likes working out. My elementary school gym teachers would literally not believe this.”
The Body Knows What the Brain Forgets
There’s a common assumption among writers that creativity lives entirely in the mind—that the work of thinking and the work of moving are fundamentally separate pursuits. Mary doesn’t buy it anymore.
“There’s a way to make the physical act of writing go faster,” she says, “which is to hunch over your laptop for the longest possible stretch of time. But there’s no way to make the thinking go faster. Except there is. And it’s to get up and move around.”
For Mary, barre3 has become the place where her mind gets room to breathe. Away from the page and the pressure of a blank doc, her thoughts loosen. Ideas surface. Creative blocks dissolve. “When I’m in the studio, my mind can drift—it’s lubricated, it’s given room to percolate, it can see past roadblocks in a way that it can’t while it’s staring at the page,” she says. “I often have breakthroughs while at barre3.”
There’s also something to be said, she notes, for the particular relief of having someone else tell you exactly what to do for 45 minutes.
Showing Up Is the Work
Until Death is Mary’s debut novel. It is also the fifth novel she has written.
The four before it never found a publisher. There were hundreds of agent queries, hundreds of short story submissions, and what she describes as thousands of rejections. The publishing world is not for the faint of heart—and Mary has the scar tissue to prove it.
But somewhere along the way, she found a framework for understanding the long arc of creative work. And it came, unexpectedly, from the studio.
“When I started barre3 Signature, I was using three-pound weights,” she says. “Now I use sixes. When I started b3 Strength, I started with twelves, couldn’t handle it, and dropped back to tens. Now I use fifteens. I would never have thought that I could get up to 15-pound weights. And now I’m like, wow—over the long arc of time, I can actually see a path to the seventeen-point-fives.”
The parallel to writing, she says, is exact. “With writing, one of the things I have learned through experience is that you will get to the end if you just keep showing up. There’s no question. All you have to do is show up enough times and do a little tiny bit of work every time, and eventually you will get to the end of your creative project.”
What surprised her most was discovering that the relationship runs both ways. The resilience she’d built through years of publishing rejection made her stronger on the mat. And the physical practice of showing up—of trusting the process even when progress is invisible—made her a better writer.
A Constant in the Chaos
Between developing the idea for Until Death in the summer of 2023 and its release this spring, Mary’s life looked something like this: two job changes, an engagement, a wedding, a signed agent, a book deal, and about a dozen rounds of edits.
“No matter what chaos was going on in my personal or professional life, I knew the studio would be there for me,” she says. “Even during the busiest, worst, ugliest periods of that time, I knew that if I could claw my way to the studio for the 45 minutes of class, I would leave feeling at least one percent more settled.”
That trust—the knowledge that the studio would always be waiting—became its own form of stability. Not just physically, but emotionally. A place where the outside noise quieted and the only thing Mary had to do was show up and move.
Until Death
Until Death follows Ophelia, a woman who returns to her hometown to move her mother, who has dementia, into care. Her parents had a miserable marriage, and Ophelia long ago swore off marriage herself. But with her mother declining and her best friend walking down the aisle, that conviction is starting to feel a lot less certain.
“The premise already has the horror and the romance baked in,” Mary explains. “The horror from the dementia, and the romance because whenever anyone in a novel says ‘I’m never getting married,’ well… you know where that’s going to go.”
And the humor? That, she says, comes from the dementia itself. “All a person with dementia ever does is stuff you would never expect. So Ophelia’s out here like, ‘Why is my mother hiding sandwiches behind the window curtains? Why is she walking up the highway at three o’clock in the morning? Also, how is it that she’s lost her whole damn mind and yet she still won’t get off my case about finding a man?’”
It’s a book about grief and love and the challenge of caring for a parent—told with the kind of dark, precise humor that makes you laugh and then feel a little guilty about it. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of book you’d expect from someone who spent years showing up, lifting heavier, and trusting the process.
Come Celebrate With Us
Until Death is available now. If you’re in Philadelphia, here’s how to celebrate with Mary and the barre3 Rittenhouse community:
- In-Studio Book Signing: May 30–31 at barre3 Rittenhouse
- barre3 Rittenhouse Book Club: June 25 (Mary will be leading the discussion)
Pick up your copy of Until Death here.
Inspired by Mary’s story? Take a class at barre3 Rittenhouse or try barre3 online free for 14 days—and see what showing up can do for you.
