Jean McGarry was born on June 18, 1952 in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended Blessed Sacrament and St. Patrick's High School in Providence, and received her BA in social relations from Harvard University in 1972. McGarry took a job as a reporter with the Rhode Island based Pawtucket Times, followed by a brief stint with the Detroit Free Press. By 1976 she had returned to school and added BA degrees in music and French from the University of California at Irvine.

After doing graduate work in art history and writing at Columbia University, McGarry attended the Johns Hopkins University where she received her MS in Writing Seminars in 1983. She would remain in the department as an instructor until 1985, followed by an Assistant Professorship at University of Missouri, Columbia from 1985-1986 and an Associate Professorship at George Washington from 1986-1987. McGarry returned to Hopkins in 1988 as a Professor of Fiction. In 1997 she was named Chairman of the Writing Seminars Department.

Airs of Providence, McGarry's first book, won the 1985 Southern Review/Louisiana State University Short Fiction prize. Her second book of short fiction, The Very Rich Hours, won the 1988 Towson State University Prize for Literature. Her third book, a novel, The Courage of Girls, was published in 1992. Her fourth book, Home at Last, published in 1994, is another collection of short stories. Published in 1997, McGarry's fifth book was another novel, Gallagher's Travels, that draws on her own experience as a news journalist in the 1970s. Her most book of short stories, Dream Date, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2002.