A natural storyteller

I love spooky things. My fourth-grade teacher put a big red circle on one of my papers and said, “You use the phrase ‘all of a sudden’ too often.” I would tell stories all day long, especially to the little kids I babysat. If I wanted to make them sit back down with their Hawaiian Punch, all I had to say was, “He walked under the streetlight, and all of a sudden.…”

Writing from pain

When I was 19, I had a terrible eating disorder [anorexia nervosa] and was hospitalized. I felt like the biggest failure on the planet. I dropped out of college. But Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth [who had looked out for Cornwell and her siblings after their mother was hospitalized with depression when the future author was 9], said, “I want you to tell your story.” She gave me a journal that I still have. And so, at age 19, I started writing my autobiography.

Not into the genre

I read Nancy Drew as a little kid, but I didn’t read a murder mystery until I decided to write them. I bought three secondhand paperbacks—P.D. James, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers—to try to learn what people did.

Spare her the gore

I’m actually very squeamish. I’ve spent days on end in morgues because it’s the only way to tell my stories, the only way to know what I’m talking about, but it has never been easy.

When she knew she’d made it

I remember landing my helicopter at a book signing years ago in a shopping mall parking lot. [She is a licensed helicopter pilot.] The line was around the entire mall. People had been waiting since 8 a.m. I almost burst into tears.

Hurry up and wait

It has taken 37 years for Scarpetta to make it to the screen. It has been optioned since 1989 and went through one studio after another and always fell apart at some stage. But I’d become friends with Jamie Lee Curtis, and she helped make it happen with Prime Video. Then Nicole Kidman agreed to take the lead role as the medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. The synergy, it sparked.

Finishing her memoir

I pulled it out of a box, having not seen it in 50 years. I always said I wouldn’t actually publish it. But there was talk recently of doing a TV show about my life, so I decided to write a treatment. And once I started, I couldn’t stop.

Regrets, she has a few

If I knew when I was younger what I know now, I wouldn’t do a lot of the stupid things I’ve done, like buy all those Ferraris. Going from having no money to making millions of dollars was incomprehensible to me, so I had a lot of fun. I felt like I had to prove I was worthy of being rich and famous. I don’t have anything to prove anymore.
—As told to Shelley Emling, editor of AARP’s The Girlfriend Book Club. Go to thegirlfriend.com for more great interviews and books content.

Patricia Cornwell’s memoir, True Crime, will be out in May. The series Scarpetta is now on Prime Video.

For an exclusive video of Cornwell, visit aarp.org/cornwell.