Who is patricia cornwell

But it gave me a much thicker skin and I got much better at just being okay about it. I was afraid to go out of my door. I was so horrified and humiliated. She didn't know about the gay stuff. I was in a very conservative city.

I was forced to deal with it when I wasn't even in a relationship at the time. It was probably one of the hardest things I've ever been through. Today, Cornwell - who's been married to Harvard neuroscientist Staci Gruber for 10 years and lives in Boston - is philosophical about it all. As a former reporter, she understands the nature of news.

You have to take the bumps with that. But you don't get to decide what you publicise if you are going to stand out there and be a public figure. The reason it became well-known was because a very prominent bookstore in Richmond Virginia banned it because they thought it was so violent.

Sometimes people become artists because of pain. I wanted to have a normal day because I wanted to feel that my life is going on as usual. She's come around to the idea, however. Now there are new challenges. I've been around a long time and I have a right to say and do pretty much what I want.

At her first signing, held during a lunch break from the morgue, Patricia sold no copies of Postmortem and fielded exactly one question — an elderly woman asked her where she could find the cookbooks. Celebrating 25 years, these characters have grown into an international phenomenon, winning Cornwell the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author, the Gold Dagger Award, the RBA Thriller Award, and the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to literary and artistic development.

After earning her degree in English from Davidson College in , she began working at the Charlotte Observer, taking whatever stories came her way and rapidly advancing from listing television programs to covering the police beat. Cornwell received widespread attention and praise for her series of articles on prostitution and crime in downtown Charlotte.

Cornwell testified before a grand jury. It was there that Cornwell says her mother started unravelling. She suffered a psychotic episode and was detained in a psychiatric hospital. Later, as a teenager, she suffered from severe anorexia. In her fiction, she invented a new genre: she revelled in the gory details, but through Scarpetta she expounded them in a cool, precise, scientific way.

She respected the victims. And strove to bring them justice. In person, Cornwell has a similar openness and forthright demeanour. I do it in every book. We take things and filter it through us and it comes out in a different form. Through Scarpetta, Cornwell has confronted her fears and overcome them. A decade ago, she wrote a book in which she points the finger at Walter Sickert, a painter of the period. Knives, daggers and great curving swords are laid out across a table and Cornwell picks them up in turn to show them to me.

I experimented. She picks up a Victorian dagger from the table and demonstrates how Jack the Ripper might have cut open his victims. She started out as a journalist, but when she chose to try her hand at crime writing, she decided to do her research. For most people, this might be a site visit and an interview, but Cornwell wanted to know exactly what the forensic scientists did and how they did it.

I honestly was so dumb, I thought when I got there I would do this for a few months and then write this great novel.

Well, I wrote one and nobody wanted it. I wrote a second and nobody wanted it. I wrote the third and nobody wanted it. And then I went back to the newspaper to see if I could get a job.

Like usual. Loser, loser, loser. I kept being told, nobody wants to read about laboratories or morgues. And a woman who does it?

No, thank you!