Patricia Cornwell will tell the story of her life and career in a new memoir.
Grand Central will publish the novelist’s True Crime in the spring, the press announced in a news release. It calls the book an “achingly honest memoir.”
Cornwell, a Miami native, was raised in North Carolina and worked as a journalist before publishing her first book, the biography A Time for Remembering: The Ruth Graham Bell Story, in 1983. Her first crime novel, Postmortem, came out in 1990; the book introduced readers to Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner with a knack for solving crimes. Scarpetta has featured in almost 30 more novels, most recently Sharp Force, published last October.
In the memoir, Grand Central says, Cornwell “excavates her own life, detailing her traumatic childhood being raised by neglectful parents, her father abandoning the young family on Christmas day, her mother being institutionalized twice, an abusive foster family, and developing a parental relationship with evangelist Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth. Cornwell depicts a harrowing hospitalization and near-death car accident.”
“I hope my readers will enjoy a peek behind the curtain of my public life,” Cornwell said in a statement.
True Crime, which features an Annie Leibovitz photograph of the author on the cover, is scheduled for publication on May 5.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
