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Neil Gaiman speaks onstage during "The Sandman" special video presentation and Q&A panel during 2022 Comic Con International: San Diego at San Diego Convention Center on July 23, 2022 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images)
Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

Neil Gaiman and Mary McGrath’s relationship timeline, explored

Everything we know about Neil Gaiman's secretive first marriage.

For decades Neil Gaiman was one of the most beloved authors in fantasy fiction. His comic books and novels earned him a legion of devoted fans, and throughout the 2010s and 2020s, his work was adapted into critically acclaimed movies and TV shows. Now that’s all come tumbling down. Fans are tossing his books in the garbage, those tattooed with his characters are frantically searching for removal or cover-up services, and the author himself is lying low.

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Gaiman’s fall from grace began with a series of podcasts in 2024 detailing a history of sexual misconduct, which blew a hole in his reputation but somehow didn’t sink it. Now a bombshell article from Vulture has finished the job, recounting in painstaking, disturbing, and — frankly — disgusting detail exactly what Gaiman has been doing to the vulnerable young women unfortunate enough to have fallen into his orbit.

The article focuses on Gaiman’s recent behavior and his relationship with Amanda Palmer, who he was married to between 2011 and 2022. But there’s also a tantalizing mention of his first wife, Mary McGrath, who he married in 1985 (long before he was famous) and divorced in 2008. So, what’s their story?

Gaiman’s first marriage

Neil Gaiman and Mary McGrath
Image via X

Gaiman met Mary McGrath in the early 80s through Gaiman’s connection to Scientology. Throughout Gaiman’s childhood, his father David was a notable figure amongst British Scientologists, with Gaiman himself considered a Scientology prodigy in his teenage years.

The year they met is vague, but McGrath appears to have arrived in England from America by the early 1980s. Soon after she began studying Scientology at a house owned by Gaiman’s father in East Grinstead. Gaiman and McGrath entered into a relationship and in 1983 they had a son named Mike. In 1985 they married and shortly afterward had their second child, a daughter, Holly.

As Gaiman was being paid in dollars for his DC Comics work the family chose to move to the United States in the early 1990s. McGrath’s family lived in Minneapolis, so Gaiman relocated to the area and the couple had their third child, Maddy. From then on the story gets a little murky, as we don’t know the particulars of what went on in Gaiman’s marriage.

However, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Gaiman frequently traveled to sci-fi and fantasy conventions, leaving McGrath to raise their children. The Vulture article claims it was an “open secret” that Gaiman was regularly cheating on his wife with women on these trips, encounters that by all accounts were consensual.

We don’t know whether McGrath permitted or was aware of her husband’s infidelity, but they gradually became estranged in the 2000s and, after a long separation, divorced in 2008. As of 2010 The New Yorker reported that McGrath was “living on a cottage on Gaiman’s property” and the two were said to have remained friends after the divorce. And that’s where the trail goes cold on Gaiman’s first wife. There’s no indication on whether she’s remarried or in another relationship and — as far as we can tell — she has no online or social media activity.


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