Marie Komárková, née Vaculíková, was born in Blansko in the family of a deputy and an official of the Brno Armaments Factory. She graduated from the municipal school in her native Spešov, and from the civic (burgher) school in nearby Blansko. When the film Madla sings to Europe ( 1940) was released in Czechoslovak biographies, her sister and classmates began to call her Madlo. Instead of a teacher's institute in Brno, she headed to Bata's Zlín during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where she stayed until November 1944. After the aerial bombing of Zlín, she was sent with other employees to the branch plant in Zruč nad Sázavou - Bat'a (1944-1948).

From Zruč, the young youth educator headed to the northern borderlands (Františkov) and was followed to post-war Ústí nad Labem by Ludvík Vaculík, who worked as an educator in Benešov nad Ploučnicí. After being expelled for political unreliability, Marie Komárková and Ludvík Vaculík found employment in the Gliwice boarding schools of the Heavy Engineering Works in Prague-Vysočany. In 1949, they married and had sons Martin, Ondřej and Jan. During her husband's compulsory military service, she began to regularly visit the Wallachian town of Brumov, where Vaculík came from.

In the 1960s she worked first as a correspondent for Czechoslovak Radio, then at a marriage counselling centre in Prague's Vinohrady district. After the Fourth Writers' Congress (1967) and the publication of the manifesto Two Thousand Words ( 1968), she and her husband found themselves in the crosshairs of the State Security, which made her life difficult until 1989. However, she did not hesitate to sign Charter 77 and organized meetings of dissidents in the villa she bought in Dobřichovice. In the 1990s, her late literary career began when her correspondence with the artist Jiří Kolář was published (1994, 1999). In 2002, Pavel Kosatík's extensive interview with Maria Vaculíková was published under the title I am Oats. Ludvík Vaculík died in June 2015, and Maria Vaculíková's life ended in January 2020.

While Marie Vaculíková did not like to remember Bata's Zlín and its dryad work conditions, Bata's Zruč left her with much more pleasant memories. It had human dimensions. When I arrived, I was greeted at the personnel department." In Zruč she met and became close to Ludvík Vaculík again. She started out as a correspondent in the local branch of the Bata School of Labour, but the management recognised her strengths and qualities and persuaded her to become an educator (1945-1948). She was prompted to leave Zruč in mid-January 1948 by a meeting with Klement Gottwald during his visit to Zruč (1946) and a change in social conditions. There were no communists in the whole concern. Therefore, they put in their own people, who were Gestapo confederates. These confederates turned into big communists and ran the company."