Patricia Cornwell on Her Dark Childhood and Best-Selling Novels

and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say a hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times opinion, host of the Ezra Klein Show.

“And for me, the best way to beat back that be willedered feeling is to talk it out with”

the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it. Here is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find the Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times.

And today we have two conversations on the show. We're going to hear from Patricia Cornwell, author of the award-winning forensic thrillers featuring the beloved character, Cascarpetta. This book's have now been made into a series starring Nicole Kidman. Cornwell is out with a new memoir and it is quite a surprising story.

We're going to hear all about it. But first, the Pulitzer's were announced this week and the big prize, the prize for fiction, went to Daniel Krauss for his book, Angel Down. I got to call Daniel the morning after the announcement to talk about this crazy book of his and to hear how he was thinking about what this all means for him and the types

of stories that he writes. We at the book review put your book Angel Down on our list of top ten books of the year that last year, so there might be some people who are already familiar with it and have read it and bought it. But for those who haven't had a chance to get to it yet, and might do so now that it

was one of this amazing prize, could you give just the briefest of summaries.

And then I have so many questions for you about the book. Yeah, it's a world war one novel about these five soldiers, these five privates who are some of the, about the five worst in this division, and they are left behind to essentially use an eyes, a soldier, people can hear screaming out in no man's land, presumably tied up in barbed wire, at least this kind of thing happened.

But when they essentially when they go out there, what they don't find is a soldier all, they find an angel who has been shot down out of the sky by artillery, which was sort of new and high flying during World War I, and this angel has been hit and has fallen into the barbed wire, and then these men realize very quickly, they have some sort of miraculous

being on their hand, and this being has an incredible ability to heal and help and could

potentially even end the war. But instead, it almost is that an angelic encounter, kind of, turns into this hellish encounter, is every man has their own way they want to exploit the angel, and so it ends up sort of tearing them apart. It's a good and surprising story, something that also is very surprising is the way

that it was written. It's written essentially as one sentence from beginning to end, which is a fascinating conceit.

“I think it takes some people just a minute or two to get into it, did the conceit come”

first or the story, or how did those two sort of meet? Oh, definitely the story. I started writing the book in more or less traditional format, and it was, I had gotten about 20 pages in maybe, and it was going well, but I remember saying to somebody, not every book has to be great, I was like, this may not be firing at all cylinders, but

it's sort of working, but I was frustrated with it. It didn't seem like I had chosen the right approach. So I literally sat down and this is something I don't often do. I don't think I've ever done, it's just sat down and thought about what does this book about, what are the things, what am I trying to say, and how could that reflect, usually

it's much more instinctive than that, how could that reflect the prose, and what I came up with was that this is a story about among many other things. It's a story about how we'll roll on and sort of my hypothesis began this cycle of industrialized violence that once we began it, we are incapable of stopping it. It just moves like a wheel, the trapped inside, and so I had the thought that, what if

I wrote it all in one sentence and the end of the book circles back to the beginning of the book, so that once you start reading it, in effect you're trapped in a book forever, and it's this ongoing wheel.

“So that's fine enough to say, but then you have to actually do it, but within a paragraph,”

if you want to call them paragraphs, when there's no end to the sentence, but within

the first paragraph, I knew it was working for me.

I loved it right away, and I felt like, oh, I fingers can't move fast enough.

It was doing all sorts of things, it was thematically relevant, it had this breakneck

“pace, because suddenly it felt like I was tumbling, and I was running so fast and just”

trying to stand my feet, and that felt like warped me as well, and then I started, I had this idea that I was going to start every paragraph with the word, and so that it kept feeling like it was that sense of one thing after another, the bombs fell, and then we did this, and then this happened, and then that happened, and so it was this, this cumulative effect, and then is it sort of additional layer?

Once I started looking at the pages like this, because I'm breaking the sentence up into these sort of paragraph-sized chunks, it began to look like poetry, or even more accurately, like a song. It looked like Bible verses, and there's a lot having to do with religion and particularly sort of churches and hymnals in the book, and I liked how it started looking like a Bible

in a way. It's one of those rare times where I feel like just the idea and the voice and the format and the perspective all just sort of dovetailed in a really meaningful way. What did you think would be the challenges of this approach and then what were the actual challenges?

I like highwire acts, I do that with a lot of my books, I try to set out a certain kind

“of format or style that it's going to be difficult to keep up, that's what kind of”

keeps you interested. I like limits, and not having periods within the prose generally was an exciting limit to have. So I wasn't that concerned about the writing of it, because I've had another previous books of mine.

I've had little stretches where I do long, longer sentences, so I knew I kind of understood what that meant in a kind of rhythmic way, what ended up being the big challenge of it was clarity. I wrote the book relatively quickly, I was so energized by the style of it that it came

real typically, but then when I said to revising it, I'd never had a book that was such

a mess, because sort of the trade-off of that kind of velocity in the writing is sort of spatial confusion, so there was a lot of just going to the book, after I do the first draft, I usually print out the whole thing and I do a draft on paper and mark it up with red pencil, and it was just all red, like the whole book was just the paper just looked pink, because it was nothing but red pencil everywhere, and it was all clarity.

It was all like I had the rhythm, you know, the book, you don't have periods, you sort of essentially depend on that sort of rhythm of tires beneath a car on the highway, so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's like this heartbeat, it goes speeds up in this

little town, but you sort of, you can plug into that rhythm, but I had never knew what

was at, it was unclear who was standing, where, what was, what was flying, by that stuff, which is really sort of nuts and bolts stuff, like in a way kind of the easy stuff in a normal book became the hard stuff in this one. I think this is a, it's a lot of things, this book is a war book, it's also a horror book,

“I think, I don't know, do you consider it to be in that genre?”

Yeah, I mean, I don't know where to put it, I honestly don't, I had the same issue with my previous book, Well Fall, like I don't, I've seen it shelved in horror, sci-fi, literature, same with, I angle down, I found it everywhere. So I don't know, it definitely has, like, my roots are in horror, and I grew up on horror. So I think whether or not I would call it a horror novel, there's elements of horror that

sort of, in fact, which is a fun word, all of my books, like there's, there's just something

intrinsic to me that I always sort of look toward the horrifying side of things, but usually

an aims of doing the opposite, like, I will have things that are terrifying or gross, but always I've tried to write about that kind of stuff as beautifully as possible. And I've always been really interested in writing beautifully about the grotesque. I've always felt like there's something about that that feels very, I've never had been able to put into words very well, but very accepting, like, they're very open.

If you can find beauty in the most, like, repellent of things, it feels like your mind is really wide open to anything, like a whether it's a type of place or a type of person or a type of art that you're consuming, it's just, to me it's, it's almost been the thing that I've hung

Yeah, I mean, and, you know, I say this with the highest respect, because I am a horror fan, horror movies, horror books, love it all. The book is incredibly gross and so it's so as well fall, you know, and so in its own way, and I'm curious about how you, when's the like the push and pull when you're like more viscera, less viscera, squishier, less squishy, you know,

“like how do you, how do you, how do you hold that line, how do you make that balance?”

I, it must be instinctive, because I don't, I don't really, ever feel like I'm ever holding back on it, like I rarely do I pull back on something and say, that's a little too gross or too much. I think in some ways, I'm a maximalist in this way, like I, I want things to be sort of overtly big sometimes, like we, you know, we were just talking about horror, there's this sort of what people call sort of A24 horror, you know, this sort of this kind of creeping dread on the corners,

and I love that stuff. But I also love horror that just runs right at you, you know, like a like something in a, in a fun house carnival, like just like some sort of like, you know, laughing zombie figure that comes out on a rail right towards your face. There's something really effective about that, and I think sometimes we can outfox ourselves, trying to be subtle,

and we should just be sort of powerful and straightforward. And for me, that really plays in a lot

when I think about Gore, which I, I think about by sort of not thinking about it, I want to go particularly in early drafts, go all the way, like do everything, be as as grandiose and as hysterical,

“even as you need to be, like particularly in a book like this where you're in a scenario that is”

grandiose and hysterical and absurd and hyperviolet, like embrace all that, push everything to the, to the max. And I've certainly done books that do the opposite, but there is, I think, real value in just grabbing someone by the neck sort of, you know, figuratively speaking and just saying, this is all coming at you all at once, just like more. And it just felt, it felt wrong and I don't think in editing, I pulled back on much at all as you can probably tell. You know, there's, you know,

that the maximum kill your darling says never worked for me. Like I've always been of the

opinion of like nurture your darling's and let them mature and grow into incredible monsters. Like like, like, like, like devote yourself, give into the things that you love. Don't, don't cut the matter, reduce them, focus on them. I went down this little haunted path because, you know, you just won the Pulitzer Prize, Pulitzer Prize is not necessarily a space or, or most literary prizes to be honest, in my opinion, where speculative fiction certainly not horror is often found.

And I'm curious what that means, what a prize like this means for the type of work that you do and others do in this space, which means a lot to a lot of people. I haven't thought about it too much yet, but I've seen it, like I've seen that start bubbling up from people I know who've been messaging me and saying what it sort of means to them, you know, and some of these are a lot of them are

“horror authors. And so while it wasn't something I thought of immediately, I think it's coming”

this sort of idea, I think it has to come sort of externally and it is this idea that there are genres that don't usually get this kind of attention. And you see this talked a lot about the movies, how there's sort of this, been this horror and is on, so maybe the past 10 years. And it's happened in books too. There's been, you know, horror novels are, I've been on, I think, on the rise

for a number of years. And you have these sort of breakthrough books that have been coming out.

And to be part of that is, you know, wonderful. It's not, I write in all genres, so it's like, it's not like, I'm not single-minded about it. Like this is something I want to do specifically with horror or whatever. But again, my, my, my roots and my, the things I grew up on or horror, you know, like, like horror saved my life as a kid, like almost literally. So to, to be a piece of

feels really good and it feels, it feels in some ways like I've held true to that you know, eighth grade or who was renting a dawn of the dead and faces of death and all sorts of horrible things in the VHS store in my little home town. And I, like, I'm still, I, that's when I learned to write you. That's when I learned how to, how to write just for you. And I was

“watching this movie just for me. And it's, yeah, it's, it is meaningful. I think you're convincing”

me here as I'm talking that, yeah, it is, it is something I think I'm going to find a lot of meaning in as we go here without asking you to totally talk about a different book. You just

published a book this year about the director George Romero about his breakthrough horror film

night of the living dead. And part of the title is this phrase that you just said, how now the living dead saved my life. You just said horror saved your life. What, what do you mean about it? Well, it's nightling dead opened the door for me for horror. And I think there was really it all times my life by specifically, most emphatically when we look at sort of the middle grade years, which were very difficult years for me. And they are for a ton of people. But they were

difficult just in terms of, like, socially and bullies and all these kind of things. And I felt very, very, very vulnerable and very anxious and all these things. It going to school is a real trial. But coming home, I would rent all these, the most insane over the top, disgusting, unrated horror films from my local adventure land video. It was called, and I only sort of realized when I was writing that book partially devoured,

people always ask horror, why are you write this stuff? And I sort of figured it out. That

watching those movies, I was building a suit of armor and reading this horror and all this Clive Barker and Alvelson stuff that I was reading. Like, I was mastering something. I was mastering terror in a certain way so that I could feel like, well, they can do what they want to me at the day time. But at night, I'm watching stuff they could never watch. I'm understanding, I'm reading Fangory, I'm magazine and I'm learning how this stuff is done. I'm a fan of the monsters and

the special effects artists. And essentially, I'm creating strength that then I can, I can sort of

“wear to school and in life to to some degree. And it was an extremely important. And I felt like”

a lifelong. I wanted to ask you about someone who's also been on the book review podcast. He was on here talking about Frankenstein, which was one of your collaborators. Guillermo de Toro, who in his own way, you talked about, you know, horror in the movie space. Like, this is a guy whose movies have been nominated for Best Picture. You know, this is an artist who has brought this formally disreputable, you know, genre to the heights of the Academy. I wonder, you know, how you think

about your work with him and what the two of you were doing in your own sort of different spaces.

Well, when we work together on the shape of water, that's, that's the thing that always struck me.

Is that, you know, when he was a kid, he was living in Mexico City and I was living in a small town in Iowa. We couldn't have been further apart. But on our own, we were both watching horror movies. And in particular, we had both watched the creature from the Black Lagoon. And we had both seen something in it that people, most people didn't see. We both saw a sort of beautiful tragic story about a creature who got, for our deal, basically. And then when we sort of met and got together

and shared this idea, it was this, this great feeling of, you know, and this is the magic of art. Like, that movie can be broadcast on a channel and some midnight show. And two people in different countries can see it and have the same reaction. And then when you find each other and people, you know, anyone who uses the internet understands this, you find someone who found the same thing in it than you. And then I think in some ways, Gamma and I were, were and are interested in that thing.

I spoke about earlier, like, finding the beautiful and the protest, as a way of, of, of finding beauty everywhere, finding beauty anywhere you shouldn't see it. It's finding beauty in the, in the

“day-to-day life, whether you're walking down a dirty subway tunnel or whatever. Like, you have to”

open your eyes, stuff, you have to open your heart to this stuff. And that's something I felt like Gamma will understood in a way that I understood. We were very copacetic in that way. Well, he is a best picture winner. You have won the Pulitzer Prize Daniel for your novel,

Hey, thank you so much.

“Coming up after the break, my conversation with best-selling crime fiction writer, Trisha Cornwell.”

I called this editor who rejected me three times. That said, "Well, what am I doing wrong?" And she said, "Well, these stories, is this what you see?" And the mortgage said, "No, it's nothing like what I see at the morgue." And she said, "Well, I want to see what you see." Oh, big yacht, the Lexus, bragging about money. Those are just props. That's not the engine. That's not the emotion that my music is running on.

That is, of course, Jay-Z. I'm John Keramonica, one of the critics behind the New York Times is 30, greatest living American songwriters project. We interviewed some of the songwriters on our list, including Taylor Swift, who hasn't sat for a video like this in a long time. Yeah, criticism has been a huge fuel for me, like a creative writing prompt or something. These are not ordinary conversations. These creative superstars are sharing parts of their process

“in ways that you rarely have access to. On top of the MadTask, it's picking only 30 people.”

We also went out and got some music world heavyweights to weigh in. Watch all the video interviews for free and check out the entire 30 greatest living American songwriters project at NYTimes.com/30gradest or in the app. And let us know if you agree with our picks. I bet you won't. [MUSIC]

Patricia Cornwell is best known for her series of books featuring the character K-Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist in chief medical examiner. The series launched with the book Post Morton in 1990 and it was one of the first crime novels to make forensic science and integral part of the story. That book went on to win all five major crime fiction awards in a single year at the first book to ever do that. Over the next few decades Cornwell expanded the story of

Scarpetta across almost 30 books. The series has sold millions of copies and just this spring Amazon Prime adapted the story for a new TV series starring Nicole Kidman. But Cornwell's

extraordinary success did not come easy. It almost never does and she documents her remarkable

journey in a new memoir True Crime. And when we talked, she said that she knew exactly where to start story. And I thought it has to start with my mother burning the close. Probably January of 1965, we've been at home from school for quite a while because of these massive snowstorms that kept hitting. In fact, it was the worst and recent history. And we would be out of school like over a week at a time. And of course, that was loads of fun for kids,

sledding and snowball fights and all that. But it was a nightmare for my mother. And she was in the throes of a psychotic depression. I mean, we know, I know that now I didn't know what was going on then. And it had, you know, it had been going and it started. This had gone on since the

“fall and gotten worse and worse and worse. And I think it all had to do with the fact that my father”

had come up to see us and he drove, he came up there with his, his new wife who was pregnant. And this was in the fall. And then by January, she'd had the baby. And I have a feeling my mother must have heard about it. And that just said her over the edge. Because she kept hoping that she and

dad would wrecking soil. I mean, she never got over him ever my whole life. And so I woke up this

one morning. I'm looking out there snow out the window. And I hear my mother's rapid footsteps up and down the hallway and my brothers are yelling at her from their bedroom saying, no, no, please stop. So what, what's going on here? So I get up and she's carrying arm loads of their clothing into the living room and throwing them into the fireplace. And there's this raging fire going. And we're, we're just all terrified and shocked. We don't know what's going on. And then she took a

clipership off the bedroom and my brother's bedroom. And she, we must, she must not have burned our coats because she said we're going out. And she starts walking us up the snowy hill. And she has my older brother holding this clipership and up we're going. I didn't know where we were going. And so there's this orange Jeep coming down with the snow plow. And it just so happens that that very moment she's doing this that Billy Graham's caretaker was coming around and he saw

I said it must have looked very strange. She was this woman with three little kids in one of them's carrying a clipership and they're walking up a snowy mountain road. So he stops and he knew who we were, the Graham's didn't. And he says, Mrs. Daniels, where are you going? And she said, well, we're going up, see the Graham's expecting us. Well, he knew that wasn't true. He said, well, you know, why don't you just hop me up on in here and I'll take you up there. You can't possibly

walk. And that's true. We never kind of gotten up there. It's unbelievably steep and all that.

curve and seeing that house, I'll build out of old split logs. I mean, this amazing place she built

and smokes coming out of the chimney and then the door opens. And here's this woman walking out. And she was standing out there with long skirt on and a shawl holding it against the cold with her hair kind of all pinned up as I remember. And Mr. Rickman leads us into the house. And we sit in front of her fireplace. And I don't remember what all my mother said to her. But no doubt my mother was talking about Florida and how she had to come here and why she moved here because of

Ruth's husband. And by the way, Ruth that heard this from all kinds of disturbed people trying to come up to her house. This was not new. But but this time it was a neighbor. And my mother handed Ruth a note and said, I'm, there's going to be a great flood and I'm sailing away on a ship. Please raise my children and your kingdom. Well, Ruth obviously couldn't keep these three strangers. She had five children and Billy and that just wasn't going to happen. But they did

arrange for people who retired missionaries from the Congo had agreed that had volunteered to take care of us. And while I am so appreciative that they did that, it was an absolute nightmare. Yeah. It was something that shaped my life forever was being was the foster mother. You go into great detail describing how terrible this foster mother was. I don't necessarily want to go to those details here. At one point they're doing you and your family a favor at the other

point. She's just like an absolutely terrible person. But it was something that needed to be done at the time because your mother had to go into a hospital. You talk about meeting Ruth Graham at this very young age. And then you talk about many years later, as you say, it's the spring of 1976. You write that it's a turning point in your life. You just come out of a facility. You are at a church service. Ruth Graham walks up. As you say, she gives you a dark red leather journal with

a brass clasp. She said she had gotten it in Switzerland. It's very fancy. And she encouraged you

to write. And eventually this led to you writing your first full-length book. You began it right

“after you turned 20 and then ended up being about 300 pages long. What was that book?”

That was what I thought was a novel, but it was a thinly-davailed autobiographical. When Ruth said, and when, you know, I'd come out of this hospital. And yes, I'd gone to church. I couldn't stand to sit there. All the neighbors were staring at me because now I would have been in a psychiatric hospital, just like my mother had been. So, oh, I must be, you know, my fate seemed to be sealed. Of course, the eating disorder is a very different thing. But even so, I was very depressed.

I felt hopeless. And I walked out of church because I would felt so uncomfortable. And the minister saw me walk out. So, the next thing I know I get called when I was home. And he said, come to Vespers tonight. I'll pick you up. He came and picked me up. Took me to this Vespers group. And the chair next to me was empty. It was all a plot. You know, I've calved and the minister had arranged for Ruth to be there. She came sat right next to me. I know what he did. He called her and said,

“Houston, we've got a problem. And so, because that's what they did. And so, she called, she sat next”

to me. And after it was over, she looked at me and she said, we should have lunch. And I thought,

right, I'm sure that's going to happen. Never. I mean, Mrs. Billy Graham's going to call me for lunch.

Sure enough, the next morning, she called. And I still can see the phone on the kitchen counter and how thrilled. What? Ruth Graham's calling for me. She said, I've got to go to Asheville. You want to come with me and go to Pizza Hut. I said, okay. So, that's what we did. And she gave me the journal at that time. And I still have it. It's in my bookcase over here. And she said, I know you write poetry. And I believe that you're talented. And I know what you've been going through.

And I want you to write your story. What you do that for me. And that is how that all started. You wrote this book. These 300 pages. It was a lightly fictionalized version of your own life up till that point. What did you do with it? There was a draft. Did you put it away?

“And that's what I wrote. Many drafts. I mean, from this time, I started writing it”

right before I turned 20 until I graduated from Davidson in 1980. I was a 1979. I was I was doing one draft after another of it. The whole time I was at Davidson when everybody else was out socializing. I was working on this. I was writing the next draft of it. And by my junior year, it had become my honor pieces. They gave me permission to graduate with honors if I would do a project.

I'm writing? And they agreed and that. So I kept doing it for that reason. And then when it was done and I got honors in English, I put it in a box all of that multiple drafts because there was more than one that I had saved. And, you know, I saved things. And then when I started becoming well known as a writer, all this stuff, we started archivally preserving these things. And so literally the manuscript that I looked at had been sitting in an archival box or I had not looked

at it since I finished writing it in college. And it was very strange to look at that pull it out of that box and then nothing. Oh, God, this is awful. It's awful. You're really as bad. I'm not kidding. Do you think that writing and rewriting this fictionalized version of yourself in your late teens early 20s? What do you think were you trying to sort of work through

“your life up to that point? I was trying to turn my experiences, I think that must have been”

it. I thought that I was trying to write a good story, but that really wasn't it. I think it was my therapy. I think that was my coping skill. And the funny thing is, it's still my coping skill because with all of the trauma and violence that I have seen, you know, turning it into

stories is a way of venting it for me. If I had to keep that all inside and never do anything with it,

that would be very haunting. But I suppose you're probably right when I was doing that in college, it must have been more for therapy because I never even tried to get it published. I never sent it anywhere. Not even once. When I finished it and got my grades, so to speak, I thought, okay, well, I'm not sure what this was all about. It's not ever going to be published, but I got a grade and and I didn't really didn't think about it anymore. You eventually got a job

as a as a journalist at the Charlotte Observer. First, you started writing TV listings. The way you describe it, you make it seem like the most horrible thing. It was awful. In respect, and it was, oh my god, it was so boring and tedious and, you know, I could imagine. I could imagine, remembering what TV listings used to, used to read like, you were eventually promoted to the Metro Desk. And then the police beat. This is 1979. And as you write, you were really covering some pretty

tough stuff. You know, you say, quote, for the first time, I was afraid to go home, bought a BB gun pistol. You say you were perpetually jumpy and afraid to be alone in the dark. You were seeing things, terrible things. How were you like taking that stuff in, metabolizing it? This is you're doing your seeing reality or having a face reality now as a journalist. Whether that leads you to think about crime about the thing that you would eventually really lean into with your fiction.

You know, the town of Monterey, for all of the horrors of my childhood, I mean, there were tough stuff for sure. But the town itself, it had a zero crime rate. So nobody even locked their doors. So to to go from that to the crime beat where you're going to homicide scenes and you're talking to rape victims in a or you're going to talk to the parents of a child who's been abducted, whose body shows up on a lake shore. This was not something that I'd ever had any exposure to.

“And the reason I think I was good at it had an aptitude for it and was so relentless”

is because it was so shocking to me. I had to find out everything I could and I think in my own weird way, I was trying to help with the investigation and I became, you know, very close of the police were, you know, we've spent a lot of time with them. And that wasn't necessarily good thing because the newspaper didn't want me solving crimes. I just wanted me writing good stories about them. But it was that changed me. If I had not been a journalist, I would not be

who I am today. I would never put a done these books. I had a journalistic, I learned how to be a journalist

when I got the job at the Charlottom server, writing all kinds of stuff, desk crime, but freak but other things to general assignment. Oh, bitch, where is it? I would get wrong and have the wrong person dead, that kind of thing. But if I hadn't done all that, I wouldn't have a journalistic approach to my research. And that is the hallmark of Scarpeda. I mean, it's almost like journalism that you turn into a novel because I research things as if they're real, but I'd

weave them into a story. And so I never looked at the world the same way after I started seeing the kinds of stuff that really happens out there. Something else that changed the way that you look at the world I imagine is when you got a job at the Chief Medical Examiner's office in

“Virginia. You started working there. You met another woman in your life who was important for”

your development for your career. Tell me about her. Tell me about Dr. Marcelo Fierro.

Well, first, let me just say the my arrival at the morgue and my ended up working there was never

And the trick is I went there to do research because I wrote the wrote biography of Ruth Graham after I left journalism. And when that was done in 1983, I said, well, now what am I going to do with myself? When I do for a living and I didn't really want to go back to journalism,

“I thought, you know, all right, books about crime. The only thing I didn't really know”

anything about was what happened to the body when I left the crime scene because I'd never talked

to a medical examiner and the one in Charlotte would never get on the phone. So I had an appointment to go down there. And that was my first encounter with Dr. Marcelo Fierro who was one of like 10 female forensic pathologists in the country. And quite frankly, just legendary. She's so good at what she does. She was just amazing. And I started doing research there talking to her whenever she'd let me. I wanted to see an autopsy. She said, no, there's no validation for you being

down there saying something like that. And I said, well, what would it take to give me validation? She said, well, I guess if you became a volunteer police officer, so I did that. But the big thing is I started, I was writing books. I started getting rejected. And I wrote one and then another and then another post-mortem was my fourth attempt. And by the time that got published, I'd been at the Emmys Office for six years. It was my full-time job.

So in that time that you were at the medical examiner's office, you started to write mysteries, which are different from what you eventually ended up making the career out of. I started writing a mystery right after I finished the Ruth book. And I didn't know what the medical examiner would do. And I was stymied. And I was already working on a novel called The Stick Doll, where I had created a blow gun in a shadow box on my wall right in this room.

But anyway, I was doing all that. And I finally got to disappointment. So I went to see her. And I went through all the stuff that I was going to do so that the person would get away with the crime or think of it. And she would say, no, that's not going to work. No, that's not going to work. No, I figured that out. No, talks to college. You will tell you otherwise. And I'd say, what do you wear to a crime scene? Do you wear a lab coat? Nope. I don't wear a lab coat to the

crime scene. And it was all these dumb questions. But this is how I began to learn what really happens. And meanwhile, I'm going there doing research and doing working on the stick doll murders. Well, that all got rejected. And I started another one. And I'm still doing research. I'm going, I'm not getting, I mean, I wasn't working there yet. And then the chief came to me

“one day and he said, if you want to do something helpful around here, he said, maybe you can help”

edit my medical legal journal that I published a couple of times a year. I said, okay, so I started doing that. Then they got a computer. And he said, if you really want to be helpful, maybe you can figure out that blasted thing in the room that they expect us to start using. So we started getting computerized. And meanwhile, I'm still getting rejected as a novelist. I'm writing at home when I go home after work. And I learned computer programming. And I

began that out of necessity. I became their computer programmer because while I'm writing books

and nobody wants. And so that was an ordeal that I never thought would happen. But if I hadn't

been there that long, I wouldn't have learned what I needed to do, what I needed to, you know, for writing these books. Coming up, how Patricia Cornwell cracked the thriller writing code became one of America's most popular authors. You were writing books that you say nobody wanted, but you eventually wrote a book that started a series that everyone, you know, wanted at some point,

which is the Scar Petta series. I want to sort of ask you at this time in your life, this young moment in your life. What was it about forensic pathology that was so intriguing to you, particularly given all the things that you had seen and that had troubled you while working up the police beat at the Charlotte Observer. And then how did you end up incorporating that into

“your fiction in a way that sort of unlocked what you would eventually do for for your career?”

Well, when I was in the grade school, I wanted to be an archaeologist. That was my pipe dream.

And I read every book that I could find on it. I was intrigued. And I was always digging for things.

I was looking for gold. I mean, I was just a weird person wanting to look for stuff. But forensic science and forensic pathology are very similar to archaeology in that you are taking little pieces and parts of something and reconstructing a life and not only the death of that civilization or the people, but who they were before it happened. And that to me is absolutely

car and you take it upstairs to the scanning electron microscope. And you do other tests and

you not only find out, you find out the making model of that vehicle and then you begin to track down who ran over this person and why. There's just something about all that that I am is patiently curious. I want to know what happened. And that's the journalist in me. I want to know the truth. I want to tell me. And I don't know why that is, but that is just how I'm wired. And so forensic pathology and forensic science fed right into that with me.

By the way, it's not because I like gore. I'm squeamish as heck. I mean, I really am squeamish. I don't like it when I have to go in the moored. I got used to it after a while because I was down there all the time. But when I haven't done it in a while, it's very offensive. I mean, the smells, the sights. It's, I mean, it's not pleasant. I would have to, a lot of my research like go into the body form. That's a, that's a horror show. And I have to steal myself to walk

“in there and do that. And I don't wear a mask. You have to be brave. But I don't like it.”

There was a series of events that happened in 1987 that led to you writing your first book or

that you incorporated rather into your first book postmortem. Could you tell us about those killings that were happening? Yeah. Well, there were several things that came into play. First of all, I'd finished. I turned in my third book and after about eight or nine months, it was making the rounds and being rejected by everybody. And I was at my wits and it was now four years. I'd been there or something like that. And I did something you're not supposed to do.

I called this editor who had rejected me three times. It was really nice in her notes. And she got in a name of Sarah and freed of the mysterious press. And she got on the phone. I was surprised when I said who it was. And I said, I know I'm not supposed to do this. But can you just tell me, should I quit? And she said, um, no, I don't think you should quit. And I said,

“well, what am I doing wrong? And she said, well, these stories. Is this what you see in the”

morgue? I said, no, it's nothing like what I see at the morgue. And she said, well, I want to see what you see. And secondly, your best character is this woman medical examiner is a minor character. Make her the main character. And I thought, oh, my God, I don't know if I can do that. I don't know enough to do that. I said, well, thank you. And I will try. Well, meanwhile, around this same time, the serial murders were starting in Richmond. And it turned the whole city upside down.

I mean, it was one of the worst things ever. And I was working at that medical examiner's office while this was happening. I was writing with the police on the weekend. So I was seeing the homes of these people we'd set outside. And we'd talk about the case. I had nothing to do with the cases in terms of what happened at our office. Dr. Fiera wouldn't let anybody, nobody was present during the autopsies, except certain key staff people. And she sealed the records and locked them

in a drawer. Because she was so afraid of leaks. Because this was such a nightmare situation going on. And is this what's happening? And I was watching how Marcelo was dealing with it. And I was traumatized.

I bought my first gun. I started taking shooting glasses. I put a deadbolt on my bedroom door

and my apartment because I was terrified of this person who was crawling through people's windows.

“But I thought to myself, what would Scarpeda do if this were happening in her jurisdiction?”

If this were her and these were her cases, what would she do? And that was the impetus what started post-mortem. And it's definitely inspired by the south side strangling cases, but does not mirror them. But that was when I decided to let Dr. Scarpeda take over and try to walk in her shoes. And I remember sitting a very long time at my computer, my word processor going, "She did, did, did, did out." No, no, no. I, did, did, did out. No, no, no. No, no. The kind of

be, "She, I couldn't figure out who's going to tell the stories that she or I." And I thought, how am I going? I'm an English major who fled from every science course and can't do math. And wouldn't go to funerals. So what the hell am I doing right in about a chief medical examiner? And but, but that was the beginning. Now post-mortem that I think it was rejected by at least half a dozen houses before scribner took it on barely. And so it's just by a thread. If that

editor Suzanne Kirk had not seen, she said, "She liked the Scarpeda character. She thought she was worth watching." And they took it. If that hadn't happened, I really would have quit after that one to try it anymore. That had been four strikes throughout. You write however that post-mortem came out and even though it eventually kicks off this massive series, you were still a newly published author. Several reviews weren't great. There wasn't

really marketing or publicity behind it. It's still, it was on a thread. And I'm wondering

write about, I don't want to want to call it like a moral issue, but this idea like, "Am I am I writing this the right way? Am I doing it in a way that is not exploitative? Am I doing it in a

right way that is not making this violence seem exciting?" That's always, and that's really good

“question because I remember one time somebody in the UK, I don't remember who it was, I said that”

you can write about violence, but you don't celebrate it. And because the stories are told from Scarpeda's point of view, there's an element of condemning this violence as opposed to make it scintillating and exciting and sexy because you'll never get that from her point of view. And that's the point of view I write from. And but it's a very, very good question because there's something I struggled with at that time, I thought to myself, "I'm seeing the real thing every day. How do I

write about this? How do I let my imagination let this infiltrate it? And how can I do this? Well,

I'm condemning it and not celebrating it because I do not want to add to the problem. But the

thing is these things do happen out there. And by the same token that it may seem very graphic and some people could say it's exploitive. But you know, we need to know these things, even if they're painful, we need to know what goes on in the world. We need to know the dangers out there. And I can't tell you how many people I've had tell me over the decades of how they lock their windows at night. They don't do this anymore. They don't do that. They're much more careful about certain things

“because they've read the Scarpeda books. Are you still someone you think who is afraid of the world?”

You'd describe growing up with a mother who used to run you through emergency drills at home. And you've had many terrible things happen to you. You started working at Jason to the police where you see so many terrible things happening. You worked in a medical examiner's office where you saw the end results of the most terrible thing that humans can do to another human sometimes. You have reasons to be afraid of the world. But you also now exist in half or a while in a

world that you are somewhat able to control because of the success and the wealth that you have accrued is the world still scary to you. Oh, God, the world is a very dangerous place. Absolutely. I mean, I don't like live my everyday as if oh my God, chicken little disguise is going to follow me. If I dare go out the door, it's not that sort of thing. But I'm very aware of the things that people do. And I'm the sort of person who I'm going to read crime stories. You know,

if I'm looking at the Wall Street Journal or better put the New York Times app, which I have on my phone, just so you know. If I'm looking at that every day like I do, and I see a big crime story, I'm going to read it and I want to know exactly what happened to those people. So yes, I am like the embodiment of an emergency siren. You put me in a room or you take me on a little walk and we should

“do that sometime and I'll tell you all the scary things I see that you should be aware of. That sounds”

like a very relaxing afternoon. It will be we'll walk through a parking lot and I'll tell you to look at every car you walk past and see what you can tell about the driver from what they left inside of it because that's what predators do. The baby shoes hanging from the rear view mirror, the gym bag, and the back that has a woman's name and radress on the tag. I can't help it. I look at all these things in passing and I go, I wish they didn't do that. I wish they hadn't done that.

Be careful over here. This is the world according to Patricia Cornwell. What can kill you, name you, abduct you. I'm going to think about it. What you can trip over or pull down the stairs while you're looking at your phone and it's relentless. It's all true but it's also relentless. You know, the world according to Patricia Cornwell has been good. You know, there was this big moment when you had true blockbuster authors, Tom Plancy, who I understand maybe was a friend of

her as John Risham Stephen King. They dominated the world of publishing and you joined that club. You'd big advances, giant crowds at your signings. I'm curious what that was like as someone who grew up in the circumstances that you detail at the beginning of this book to through hard work and time arrive at a point where you're flying helicopters, you're living in homes that have gates around them. You're showing up in bookstores in their thousands of people waiting in line. What was

what is the dissonance if there was one between that? I don't, I did not even, I couldn't comprehend

it. It happened. You know, it was very first or you had nothing happened forever and then postmortem

awards is what changed everything. You know, I got $6,000 for postmortem. I got 120,000 for body of

“evidence and that was, that to me was like, oh my goodness, because I was earning like $27,000 a year”

at the Emmy's office when I was full time there. But then, I mean, within another year, I was a millionaire and you will appreciate a hope. I went through an Elvis stage, which was like, hey, nothing, I'm going to, if I wanted, I'm getting it. I'm going to drive that Mercedes. I'm going to get that fancy outfit. I'm going to dress all in blaze orange and look like a traffic cone when I walk in the restaurant and when people are staring at me. I wish I'd had a really good advice or someone

who was said, and maybe, let's don't do this right. You know, maybe don't go on that shopping spring. You don't need this and that and the other. But it was, it was crazy because I went from having nothing to, I almost couldn't, there wasn't much I couldn't afford at least it felt like it. But I have to say the truth. It was a bit destabilizing. You know, well, first it was all the money and also then you have all these movie stars and stuff. You know, you're running around with

Demi Moore and Bruce Willis and meeting people at Woody Harrelson and Robert Bedford and you know,

“the Rob Reiner, I remember sitting on a plane with him and I have a story about that in my”

book because I didn't know who he was. Here I am at Demi Moore's birthday party and we're in the big old corporate jet club, golf stream, flying back to LA from Las Vegas, all the big famous people are in the back. I'm sitting up front by myself and there's this bearded man sitting across to me. And he said, hello and I said, hello and he said, hello and he said, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm bloody blah, you know, here because of Demi when I write these books and I said,

and what do you do? Well, it was only the director of the Freakin movie whose plane we were on. It was Rob Reiner and he said, well, I used to be on this show called All in the Family. And you know, for the rest of, and I'm so sorry, what happened to the Reiner's, but for the

rest of the days that I knew him and I would run into him from time to time, I always kidding him

about that. I said, you were so kind of me at a time when I felt so out of place and scared and overwhelmed and I've never forgotten it because you couldn't maybe feel like an idiot at that moment. It was destabilizing and I didn't have anybody in my life that I could really talk to who could help me with how to cope with all of that. That's no wonder I had that car wreck. I mean, it was like, it almost seems inevitable in hindsight that I was going to literally run off the road.

Yeah, you write about this incident, you know, you're in contact with Demi more because you're trying to get a big screen version made of a Scarpetta story. Several actors sort of pass through, Demi more is very interested. And you are involved with writing, trying to write a screen play, it's a lot of pressure. And if you can tell the story, there's a very, very terrible car wreck that you were involved in. Well, you know, so what happened is when postmortem came out,

and when it won, it started winning the awards and the LA Times Book Reviewer Charles Champlain,

who had given a wonderful review for postmortem, which also was rather a game changer.

He came to one of my awards ceremonies and he said to me, he was very nice and he said, "You know, Jodie Foster ought to play Scarpetta in a movie." And I know I didn't even talk and really about movies to me before this. I said, "Oh, my goodness. Well, yeah." I mean, but I also would like to have a castle somewhere. I mean, but okay, he said, "I'm going to range for you to meet her because I'm talking to her. I'm interviewing her in the fall or something,

or whenever it was." So sure, I flew to LA for that to meet Jodie Foster. And of course, fans, everybody would have, for years thought she would be such a perfect Scarpetta, but anyway, that was the beginning of that. And while this was going on, I got word that Demi Moore was interested in playing Scarpetta. And so I said, "Well, that's unbelievable, but I have to make sure that I have to know that Jodie won't do it." And she made it very clear that she wasn't going to do it.

“I didn't, we should chat about it. And so that's how the Demi thing started in the summer of 1992.”

And for the next almost six months, I mean, I was at her house in Malibu. I was at her house in Sun Valley, what went to her birthday party in Las Vegas. I mean, she came to Richmond to the Ami's office. She came to FBI Academy with me. I went to a party with her in a premiere in New York. I mean, there were lots and lots of stuff while I'm writing the screenplay for this and we're

developing it. But here's the thing, most people don't know. I didn't have a contract.

And I wouldn't pay to penny. This was just a verbal thing that we were doing and the hindsight, that probably wasn't the smartest thing. So, but it was just, I never written a screenplay before,

She's overwhelmed. And so it's a chryotrist and Richmond that I would go see from that nap time to time for therapy. She said, you know, I'm going to put you on the project. That might help you just to calm down a little bit. Well, did the opposite. That was gasoline on the fire. For me, I started drinking more because I couldn't calm down. And that is what led to that terrible accident in January of 1993. And which pulled the plug, you know, then that was,

that was the end of that whole thing. You know, I was supposed to have go back to the FBI Academy with Demi and I canceled it. I went into a treatment center. I didn't tell her that I lied and said, I was on a safari somewhere from book researcher. I had my staff teller that

“my or somebody teller that I didn't have much staff back then. But, but that's how that all happened.”

And that it's, I'm just lucky that I wasn't killed, really. That was terrible accident. Yeah, the way you describe it, it's quite, it sounded quite serious. Somehow decades later, you do have finally someone playing K-Scarpetta. Who would have believed it would happen after all the screen? I know. I'm a major actress. And not just a someone. I mean, she's, I've heard, you know, Nicole had been mentioned.

Nicole Kidman had been mentioned to me for over 20 years. And, you know, she was always a top

contender for who would be a great Scarpetta, along with a couple other people. But, Demi, Demi was completely out of the picture. And I talked to Susan Serrand and then it was Angelina Jolie and a number of different people. And then it circled back around to Nicole. And so, Scarpetta was so huge in the 90s, especially. But, but it's harder to sell that today. There's so many shows out there. So many people writing about forensic stuff and all the rest of it.

And it may not be the, it's not the same thing that I do. But, but I did not. After so many failed attempts, I just didn't see how this was going to happen ever. And so, to have it happen, and then in such a big way, is still, I'm not sure I've wrapped my mind around it to be honest with you. Well, isn't it nice that there are still things that can surprise us? I am so grateful. I mean, I'm so happy with what they've done. It's a really,

it's an excellent show. It's not identical to my books, but it shouldn't be. I'd like to circle back as we near the end here Patricia. Ruth Graham told you all those years ago,

“you should tell your story. In 2013, when you did a by the book interview for The New York Times,”

you said, "I can't imagine writing my memoirs anytime soon." This was in 2013. I hope I have too much ahead for that. There are still many people around who might feel uncomfortable about ending up in a published memoir. Ultimately, yes, I will want my story told with layering, unflinching honesty. That was 13 years ago. Do you think you've accomplished that here? Yes, I have. That doesn't mean I've told you everything. I don't tell anyone.

No, I mean, you know, there's some things that I don't tell in that memoir that I will never tell

because they shouldn't be told, including some things that I've seen in doing my research or witnessed that were so bad that I literally had to go home because I couldn't, and that's scar you. But I've told the important stories, and it's not been easy, because I don't really like talking about people, particularly if something's negative, and I've tried to be very careful about that,

“but I cannot, I have to say the things that happened that shaped me. And I think that if Ruth were”

to read this, and if she were still here and could read this, I don't know most of all she would laugh, and she would say, you know, I've tried so hard to straighten you out, but you've

just always been a bit of a mess now, I haven't you. Are you glad that she gave you that

very fancy Swiss journal all those decades ago? Yes, most of all, I'm glad that she told me to write my story. The journal wasn't what I wrote it in. I didn't write any of it in that journal. I wrote poetry in the journal over a period of years, but I borrowed a neighbor's typewriter, literally my next door neighbor because I didn't have one, and I would go over to every day and work on the story that Ruth wanted me to write. That was what started me writing, that story that I wrote

in college that preserved some memories that have helped me with the memoir that I just wrote. And it is quite a memoir. True crime. Patricia Cornwell, thank you so much for joining the book review podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure and honored to be with you to thank you again. The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, and Patricia Sulbutton.

and Alicia by E2, special thanks to Dahlia Haddad. We want to hear what you think about the show. So send us an email at book review at nytimes.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.