Has five children with her husband, Mike, a lawyer.
Thanks to promotion by Oprah Winfrey, her third novel, "Songs in Ordinary
Time" (Viking/Penguin, 1995), sold 1.5 million copies. After receiving
the phone call from Oprah to notify her that the novel would be
mentioned on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986), Morris at first thought it was a prank.
Her first novel, "Vanished" (Viking/Penguin, 1988), took years to write
and was not published until she was 45, but became a big success and
was nominated for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book
Award.
"I am not part of any literary world. And I have no desire to move into
a literary world. I am wary of letting an aura take the place of the
effort of writing." (New York Times, Jan. 28, 1991)