This literary memoir is as good as it gets, with more action and drama than many novels.
The life of a hugely popular crime novelist has been full of outsized violations and blessings.
With her blockbuster series featuring forensic medical examiner Kay Scarpetta finally making its way to the screen this spring in a series starring Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis, Cornwell’s 43rd book tells the story behind it all. In an opening scene, Patsy’s mother, Miami-born Vivien Leigh-lookalike Marilyn Daniels, inexplicably burns all of her three young children’s clothing. Memoir mavens will recall a nearly identical moment in Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995) and rightly suspect that another beautiful, deeply disturbed Southern mother is about to imprint her particular flavor of crazy on the formation of a literary mind. “She was always anticipating what might injure or kill us. Fires and carbon monoxide, floods, hurricanes, murderers, sexual predators, drug addicts.” Surely there would be no Patricia Cornwell without that. After chaotic early years with Patsy’s father in Florida, Marilyn bolted with the kids to Montreat, North Carolina, home of evangelist Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth, complete strangers with whom she seemed to consider leaving them. Amazingly, Ruth Graham reacted to this by finding a foster situation for the children and becoming a lifelong second mother to Patsy. Both Patsy’s early childhood and her years as a reporter were marked by incidents of sexual assault. The latter, a rape by a source, is flagged as fundamental to the disintegration of her marriage to Charlie Cornwell, a professor whom she fell in love with as an undergrad at Davidson College. Her interest in crime led her to pivot from journalism to a job with the chief medical examiner of Virginia, where she met the woman who would become the inspiration for her flagship character. Cornwell was surprised to realize after her first marriage broke up that she was bisexual; she has been married to her current partner, Staci Gruber, for over 20 years. There are plenty of boldface names in this excellent account of hard-won success, with candor about the failures as well as the wins. “I’d gone from nobody wanting what I wrote to being one of the best in the world as a crime novelist.”
This literary memoir is as good as it gets, with more action and drama than many novels.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781538778449
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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