She was the world’s highest-paid female writer. Why is her memoir such a letdown?

MEMOIR
True Crime: A Memoir
Patricia Cornwell
Sphere, $34.99

Patricia Cornwell freely admits she doesn’t read reviews of her books: “To this day I rarely read anything written about me, most of all book reviews”. It may be fortunate then, that she misses this one.

The prolific forensic crime author, whose Scarpetta series once saw her become the world’s highest-paid female writer, arrives with a memoir that reveals her limits with one genre: self-portrait. True Crime attempts to chart the 69-year-old’s remarkable life, one of enduring trauma, failures and much hardship, to emerge as one of crime fiction’s bestselling practitioners.

But succinctness and self-examination are often scant in this autobiographical exercise, as Cornwell delivers an uneven chronicle that gives clues but few full answers. Like her novels, the exhaustive attention to detail and gritty realism is there, but substance and introspection is absent by its end.

Born in Miami, Florida, Cornwell was the daughter of a former flight attendant and a lawyer on his way up the legal ladder. Both suffered from bouts of mental illness, with her mother the worst affected, “swinging from deep depression to bursts of mania”. A desperate move to the hometown of evangelist Billy Graham followed when the father walked out. Ruth Graham, the minister’s wife, would help heal the fractured clan, first getting the mother much-needed treatment and later in becoming Cornwell’s mentor.

Childhood is where much of the memoir’s action takes place, with almost 200 pages reserved for life before puberty. Cornwell’s trauma as a child – a dysfunctional household fuelled by her mother’s manic episodes and father’s ongoing absence – explain her lifelong distrust of people and the outside world. “Fear and I are old companions,” she writes.

Years on, there’s her own stint in a mental health facility – a college dropout beholden to bulimia and depression – which forces Cornwell to face her own crossroads: life itself. It would be Graham’s renewed care and gift of a red leather-bound diary that would prove a turning point in Cornwell’s life – and irrevocably shape her fiction. “Carrying a journal everywhere became a lifelong habit … I’d make myself look at something as if I never had before,” she says.

College would lead to an infatuation with an unrequiting older English professor, who finally relents and gifts her both a ring and the “Cornwell” name. Journalism is her next step, with Cornwell landing a gig at a big-city newspaper covering the crime beat while attempting to write a biography of the female Graham too.

After battles with the Graham organisation over the book and a sexual assault by an informant, she leaves reporting and her marriage to pursue a new vocation: forensics. A job in a medical examiner’s office saw her meet the woman who would inspire her formidable fictional coroner, Kay Scarpetta. “I’d follow her as she made her evidence rounds, learning about serology, fingerprints, tool marks, toxicology, firearms, footwear impressions. I couldn’t have ended up at a better place,” she writes.

Cornwell, whose Scarpetta novels have recently been adapted into an Amazon TV series, would popularise the “forensic thriller” genre and become a major celebrity author in the process.

Some scandals would beleaguer Cornwell, like a 1990s news story during an attempted murder trial that claimed she was part of a lesbian love triangle. The ongoing media saga forced her to publicly come out as bisexual. “I loved men but felt emotionally more connected to women,” she admits. (She married her partner, Harvard professor Staci Gruber, in 2006.)

When fame and fortune arrive for Cornwell, True Crime especially loses its appeal. Insights on her ongoing research, including time spent at Interpol and the FBI, are undermined by her endless name-dropping (see friendship with Demi Moore) and excessive ostentation (“I had on Armani and was travelling with an entourage that included bodyguards”). She also sidesteps responding to critics about her Jack the Ripper exposé, Portrait of a Killer, simply ignoring genuine concerns from historians over her claim that German-British painter Walter Sickert was the murderer.

True Crime, unlike much of Cornwell’s propulsive fiction, can be as longwinded as it can perfunctory. It provides much detail on the writer’s life but often doesn’t adequately capture the self-scrutiny needed for autobiography. Her former career at the coalface of crime sheds some light, but unlike more talented memoirists, her motivations for sticking to this field for so long aren’t fully limned.

Perhaps Cornwell would be wise to stay with fiction in the future.

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