USA Today has a good profile of Patricia Cornwell today. Cornwell grew up in Montreat, and has gone on to be a very successful novelist.
The 16th Scarpetta novel, aptly named Scarpetta (Putnam, $27.95), goes on sale today.
On this chilly fall morning, Cornwell is dressed in Armani jeans, a black T-shirt emblazoned with a rhinestone skull, and a leather Armani jacket. For the first time, she’s welcoming the media into the sprawling farmhouse-style home she shares with Staci Gruber, 41, whom she married in 2006.
Cornwell, 52, has never before discussed their marriage with a mainstream U.S. publication. She did talk about it this year with The Advocate, a gay magazine, and she has spoken with the British press. She considers her sexual orientation enormously private.
“I’m not a soapbox kind of person,” she says. “My private life is not 100% comfortable, but I’ve decided these are the shoes I walk in. They may pinch a little bit now and then, but I’m going to keep them on because they are what they are.”
Much of her reticence, she says, can be traced to her small-town upbringing in Montreat, N.C. “Mother used to say,” she recalls, with just a touch of a Southern accent, “the worst things that could happen to anybody were to be an alcoholic and a homosexual.”
Lessons of hardship and kindness
Cornwell’s childhood was difficult; her father abandoned the family when she was 5. At one point, her mother’s depression made her incapable of caring for Patricia and her two brothers.
“The world was so tough when I was growing up that I was much more comfortable making one of my own. I developed enormous powers of transporting myself with my imagination out of my environment. I literally had to do that for survival.”
Ruth Graham, the wife of the Rev. Billy Graham and the Cornwells’ nearby neighbor, got medical help for Cornwell’s mother and found a temporary foster family for the children. She encouraged the teenage Cornwell to keep a journal.
Graham remained a close friend until her death in 2007. “I would not be the same person because she was such a profound influence when I was growing up,” Cornwell says. “It had nothing to do with religion. This was about kindness.”
Cornwell made Graham the subject of her first book, the highly praised 1983 biography A Time for Remembering, which was updated and reissued as Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham in 1997.
The most important person in her life now is Gruber, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
The couple met four years ago when Cornwell was doing research into neuroscience at Harvard. She later moved to Massachusetts from Florida to be with Gruber.
“Staci is incredibly grounding. I feel very safe with her,” Cornwell says.