Another Turn of the Screw
Sara Paretsky
16th Annual McCusker Lecture
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Dominican University
Co–sponsored by the Freedom to Read Foundation at the American Library Association
When I wrote my first V. I. novel, I had a fairly simple outlook and a fairly simple set of goals [1]. I needed to prove to myself that I could write a novel. And I wanted to change the negative ways in which fiction depicts women.
I am part of the Woodstock generation. Perhaps at our worst we were arrogant and ignorant, but at our best we believed that with enough energy and enough commitment to justice, we could change the world.
I started writing Indemnity Only in 1979. My peers and I had done such a great job with poverty, race and war, I figured getting V. I. to end sexism would be a lead–pipe cinch. Arrogant, ignorant, but committed — that could be my epitaph.
As the years have passed, I don’t know if the world has become more depressing, or that I’ve lost my optimistic energy, but my goals are also harder to define. Of course, we are not the only people to live in difficult times, and I am not the only older — okay, aged — person who has looked in dismay at the changes in the world around me and started snarling.
Still, some of the changes of the last decade are pretty horrific. I often think about them when I’m on the road, because being on a book tour is not as much fun as it once was. Although it’s always good to connect with other readers and writers, doing a program in a different city every night for two weeks makes it hard to enjoy the connection.
However, flying in the post 9–11 world makes the tour a real misery: you get up early to be at the airport in time to deal with all the whimsies of the T.S.A. You finally inch through the line to the conveyor belt, where you strip as fast as you can while the people behind you are clicking their tongues impatiently. You fling your make–up and your best jacket and scarf into a bin where people have put their shoes.
I don’t know about you, but I never remember to sterilize my shoes before I head to the airport, and even if I did, the floors look as though they were last cleaned during the Eisenhower administration. As the line pushes behind you, you retrieve everything and put your clothes back on as best you can to sprint for the gate. And then you get up at five the next morning to do it all over again.
After my most recent tour, I grumbled to my husband that I was ready for a career as a Vegas stripper. He gave me the look that Spouse A gives Spouse B when Spouse B is acting clueless.
“The essence of stripping is the tease,” he said, “the slow removal of garments.” He thought for a moment. “On the other hand, I guess you are the perfect stripper for the age of Twitter.”
The Age of Twitter, e–commerce, the e–book. Amazon’s ad for the Kindle tells us that faster than we can read the ad, we can download content. We shouldn’t have to wait as long as a nano–second for anything. It’s as though we’re a nation of newborns, whose needy wails have to be instantly gratified.
This includes reader’ desires for content from writers, and publishersrsquo; demands that we produce it. A May 12 2012 article in the New York Times proclaimed that “In the E–Reader Era, a Book a Year is Slacking.” Commercially successful writers like Lisa Scottoline and Lee Child are working day and night to write two or more books a year. None of us will match James Patterson’s 13 titles a year, although he does farm the actual writing out to what one publisher called “content providers.” Silly me — I thought we were writers.
Publishers also expect us to add to our workday by using social media to be in constant connection with our readers, or “fans” as William Morrow publisher Liate Stehlik said. We are no longer writers, they are no longer readers. Stehlik says, you have to “have your author out in the media consciousness as much as you can.”
(By the way, “Literary writers” are exempt from the production demand, the Times said. Marilynne Robinson is still free to publish a book every eighteen years and have the world go crazy around her.)
I can’t write a book a year, let alone two books a year. Physically my body won’t take it, but mentally, writing like a demon doesn’t give me time to think, to get to that interior place where stories live.
I’m caught as a writer and a person between two worlds, at war with myself and with the marketplace. I want to be as successful as Lisa Scottoline, but I want my work to be as beautiful and profound and respected as Marilynne Robinson’s.
About the same time I read the piece in the Times, I was on a panel with a so–called literary writer, someone whose work is widely proclaimed as beautiful and profound. She turned to me while we were signing books after the panel and said, “Your books were my bridge back to writing. I was reading nothing but mysteries for a while, and yours were almost as good as real books.”
Real books, unlike the mirages that I write.
Many writers that I know, real and imaginary, are in a more–or–less constant state of self–torment, what the critic Ruby Rich calls auto–sado–masochism. First you tie yourself to the bed, then you beat yourself up. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know how to do it, I’m a fraud. What Annie Lemont refers to as Radio Station KFKD runs through our heads; every negative word a parent or a teacher ever said taunts us.
I am a person at war with myself on many fronts. I want to be a moral, courageous person, but I too often take the soft, risk–free option. I want to be an artist who puts my work first, but I was brought up under the evil wings of the Angel in the House. Even now, at 65, I struggle to make my work central to my life.
What my stepsons, grandchild, house, husband, dog, social justice program, political candidate demand from me comes first, because when I put my work first, KFKD plays those voices telling me not to be so self–centered. It plays them telling me that my writing is derivative, that my accomplishments don’t amount to much, because brothers, or real writers, or a mountain goat, does it so much better. (I must add that my husband is a constant supporter of my work. He patiently waits for dinner until I feel able to finish writing for the day, which often puts us on a Spanish schedule — dinner at 9 or 10 p.m.)
The Angel in the House is the formal name for an unnatural vision of women described by Coventry Patmore in his 1854 eulogy to his wife’s self–abnegating nature.
The struggle with the angel was a constant for 19th–century writers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning confronts her head–on in Aurora Leigh, her epic about a woman who heroically finds her poetic voice. Barrett Browning, escaping her father’s house for Italy with Robert, lived an extraordinary second life as the friend and chronicler of Italian revolutionaries, and as a vehement anti–slavery advocate; she may have done better than most in ridding herself of this monstrous spirit.
In a world where women’s roles were narrowly defined, Victorian writers sought ways either to retreat from these definitions, or to find other sources of nurture and recognition. Illness was one escape route; taking to bed seemed to be a useful strategy for Victorian artists trying to avoid a life of domestic slavery. Barrett Browning did it, and the great writer–explorer Isabella Bird was always so ill in her father’s Edinburgh house that she couldn’t get out of bed — until the day came to board a trans–Atlantic steamer once again. Bedridden, she died at home in 1904 at the age of seventy–three; if she’d headed to Antarctica, she might have lived another twenty years. I’ve always admired the enterprise of these pioneering women.
The great writer Elizabeth Gaskell didn’t hide. A mother, a social justice activist in Manchester, and a friend of leading Victorian scientists and writers, she also produced beautifully realized novels that laid bare the deep divisions in English society: between mill owners and mill hands, between moral standards for women versus those for men, between children in poverty and those in affluence. Gaskell died young of heart disease: hers was a punishing schedule.
Thanks to her, to Barrett–Browning and Virginia Woolf, the angel’s power was not as strong in my life as in theirs. Still, I fear that I am not the last woman in America to face that flying demon. We have made enormous gains in the last fifty years in many arenas, but we still have a long road in front of us. There is a significant minority in America that feels deeply threatened by the recent changes in women’s estate, and keep trying to roll back that clock to 1950. One potent example is the language of abstinence–only curricula, which is identical to the language used by Coventry Patmore in 1854. In the era of Hillary and Condoleezza, we are still using tax dollars to tell little girls that they need to be submissive, subordinate, subservient.
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I wonder sometimes how I became a writer — a professional, public writer, I mean. As a child and young adult, I was always writing and imagining stories, but the turmoil of my parents’ home made me feel I was living behind a glass wall. The constant criticism I received, and the violence of our home life, left me feeling affectless — certainly not like a person who could be active and engaged enough in the world to write for publication.
Like many people, I turned from loneliness to the world of books. The books I read and the stories of my own that I wove became more present for me than the dull routine around me. However, as I became a more sophisticated reader, I discovered that the lives of women in fiction were as much, if not more, limited than my own.
Broadly speaking, women in the mystery have been inconstant, deceptive, manipulative monsters. Or they have been the innocent virginal types who get themselves in a peck of trouble and are rescued by a male hero.
About the same time that Gaskell published Ruth, in which a mill owner gets one of his workers pregnant, Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote Lady Audley’s Secret, where Lady Audley commits murder to cover up her own secret about having borne a child. Ruth has to die, Lady Audley is committed to an insane asylum. Women with a sex life must be punished, even by Gaskell — although Barrett–Browning and Charlotte Bronte did both beseech her to let Ruth live.
Notable 20th–Century heroines include Carmen Sternwood of The Big Sleep. The first time Carmen sees Philip Marlowe, in the hallway of her father’s house, she greets him just as you or I might welcome a stranger. Marlowe tells us:
| [S]he turned her body slowly and lithely, without lifting her feet. Her hands dropped limp at her sides. She tilted herself towards me on her toes. She fell straight back into my arms. I had to catch her or let her crack her head on the tessellated floor. I caught her under her arms and she went rubber–legged on me instantly. I had to hold her close to hold her up. When her head was against my chest she screwed it around and giggled at me. |
At the end of this complicated novel — filled with so many murders that Chandler famously couldn’t account for one of the bodies during the film adaptation — it turns out that almost all the murders in the book were committed by men whom Carmen Sternwood had driven past the point of reason by her sexuality.
Of course, The Big Sleep is a novel, it is fiction. So is War and Peace, where the ardent, artistic Natasha turns out to be suffering from a disease for which the cure is pregnancy: the novel ends with her ecstatically displaying a stained diaper. So also is the story of Eve, who uses her brand new, never–road–tested sexual powers to get Adam to eat the apple.
V. I. Warshawski’s strong, angry voice — which readers either love or hate — came out of my own anger, my own sense of helplessness, at these dominating voices of women’s proper place, women’s sexuality, women’s art.
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The women’s movement provided one support to my becoming a published writer. Another powerful impetus grew out of my experience of Chicago. My introduction to the city came in the summer of 1966, when I answered a call for college students to take part in a “Summer of Service.”
The whole country was in turmoil that summer. The decade of Civil Rights activism sparked by the Montgomery bus boycott had led to court and legislative victories, but hadn’t changed a lot of reality on the ground. Job, housing,and education discrimination were facts of life from Boston to Birmingham.
Chicago, with its large African–American population, had been dubbed the most segregated city in America. Even with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Chicago had written covenants prohibiting integrated neighbourhoods. Most Lake Michigan beaches were off–limits to black children. The priest at the Catholic church in what is now Barack Obama’s neighborhood declared from the pulpit that no N – would be allowed in his church.
The summer of 1966 that I spent in Chicago changed my life forever.
My co–workers and I worked in one of the so–called “white ethnic” communities, on the city’s South Side. We were trying to broaden the world view of the kids there, trying to get them to see that you might respond to people of different races or religions with something other than rocks and guns.
As the city exploded in furious anti–integration riots, we questioned whether we were doing much good. Even so, I came away filled with the sense that change for good was possible. I believed that if my peers and I put enough energy and good will into the struggle, we could transform America. Maybe it was arrogance, or ignorance, but I felt that my destiny lay in Chicago.
When I finished my undergraduate degree and was at loose ends, not knowing what to do next, the couple I’d worked for in Chicago invited me to stay with their family while I found a paying job in the city. Later, I did a Ph.D. in U.S. history, trying to understand and come to terms with the roots of the misery playing out on the city’s streets.
Later still, I created my Chicago investigator, V. I. Warshawski, who grew up in a five room bungalow on the city’s South Side like the one I’d lived in the summer of ’66.
When I was imagining my detective, I wanted V. I. to reflect the ferocity with which Chicagoans cling to their ethnic identities; I chose Polish because I knew I couldn’t write convincingly about Latina or African–American experience, and one of my grandfathers had come from Poland. I can’t tell what language what last names belong to, so I thought, “Warsaw, that’s in Poland, Warshawski must be a Polish name.”
I don’t know Polish culture, any more than I know Black or Latina — and my work betrays that: after making V. I.’s paternal grandparents Polish immigrants, I never have her doing the stuff that locals do, like going to Krakow dance festivals or the Pulaski Day parade, or venerating Pope John Paul II.
I should have known I was doomed to ethnic ignorance from my stint as a secretary in the political science department at the University of Chicago. This is where I had my introduction to hyphenated Americans. Polish–American students expected me to waive fines for them, or get them into over–subscribed courses. When I wouldn’t, they told me I was a traitor to the Polish nation.
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The children I worked with in 1966 gave me a particular eye for the city. We would take them all over town on the L. Many had never been out of Gage Park, even to see the Christmas lights downtown, or to go to the beach some five miles to the east. Whenever we returned to home base, we would ask them to describe what they’d seen, and it was never the big buildings or the parks: it was the details up close. Drunks passed out on rooftops. A fox in the weeds along the train embankment. I try always to remember that close–up, that particular vision, that makes the city seem both strange and intimate.
The summer changed my life in other, less rewarding ways: it turned me into a Cubs fan. The White Sox, who played almost in our front yard, wouldn’t return our phone calls. The Cubs gave us free tickets for our kids every Thursday that summer. In Chicago, an honest politician is defined as one who stays bought, and, sadly for me, the Cubs bought my loyalty all those years ago. I’ve tried to kick the habit — but every April I find myself memorizing the lineup and the averages.
Above all, my summer as a volunteer made me acutely aware of how helpless many of the people around me felt.
I’m not very interested in the needs or motivations of the meta–powerful, the Koch brothers, the Halliburton’s, the Enrons; it’s a weakness in my books that I don’t explore the characters of the wicked very well. I’ve always sided with the underdog, and my Chicago summer made the raw neediness of underdogs palpable to me.
There are readers who don’t like that aspect of my writing. One woman wrote: “[Blacklist] is just a political hate book. ... Writing these types of stories enables you to become part of the liberal elite and to all the lavish elaborate parties where you bash America and, of course, are invited to speak on college campuses.”
Another reader said, “Can you concentrate on writing V. I. Warshawski novels instead of the paranoid pinko–liberal trash that you spew out?”
Readers have told me they’ve thrown out my books in disgust or thrown them across the room hard enough to break the spine. It’s not easy to read a letter like that, but I think of Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Both were storytellers, first and foremost, but they wrote stories against the backdrop of poverty, homelessness, sweatshop labor, and the extreme disparities of wealth in Victorian England.
In 1855, following publication of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine had some forthright criticism of Dickens. He had committed the ultimate crime that readers and publishers despise in writers: he had abandoned his brand and taken up serious commentary on Britain’s judicial and social systems.
One reviewer wrote:
| “In all his attempts to embody political questions, Dickens has never shown a spark of original thought ... We don’t blame him for not being a great politician ... we blame him for leaving the circle where none but he should walk ... we don’t want him to be a politician; we want him to be a humorist.” [Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, April 1855, review of Bleak House and Little Dorrit.] |
Another reviewer ended a scathing critique by saying, “I have written in an impartial spirit, denouncing Mr. Dickens’ literary faults for his own good and that of his readers.”
Other reviews condemned the attacks Dickens made on preachers who poured hellfire on the heads of the poor while neglecting their lack of food and shelter.
Dickens claimed to pay no attention to his reviews, but his correspondence shows that he cared passionately. He often wrote stinging rebuttals. I try to ignore negative reviews and criticism, unless they’re telling me something that will help me be a better writer, but it’s hard not to be thin–skinned. It’s hard not to second–guess yourself.
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We’re living through a time of radical change in America. The Supreme Court ruled in the winter of 2012 that cops can strip search anyone they stop, even if the person they’ve stopped has committed no crime. Social Security is up for grabs, as is access to contraception. Amazon may make bookstores obsolete. And the book, the word made visible, which has sustained me throughout my life, may not survive, either.
I did background research for this essay at the University of Chicago library. Whenever I go into the stacks the smell of the books — maybe it’s just the foxing on the pages — operates on me with as much force as Proust’s madeleine did on him. As I was walking home I ran into a friend and said to her, “I love the U. of C. library; it’s full of books.”
Marcia thought that was pretty funny, but many universities, including Harvard and the University of Michigan, have moved big chunks of their collections to remote facilities. The New York Public Library is about to do so. You have to allow 24 to 48 hours between finding a title you want to examine and actually getting to see the book; you can’t look at a whole collection.
Many libraries have come to believe that the book has become negligible compared to the electron. Perhaps that is true, although I’m not sure that the scent of old electrons will ever produce much nostalgia in anyone. I am one of those who will not give up my books until you pry them from my cold dead fingers.
Beyond the issue of what delivery vehicle you prefer for the written word — the iPhone, the computer, the tablet, or the printed word — there is a serious question. That is the question of voice. How do we hear new voices or less popular voices, oppositional voices?
Amazon, which now controls over sixty percent of book sales in all formats in America, has algorithms which determine what titles are most popular and belong on their home page. This process starts, by the way, with publishers, who pay Amazon a fee to feature a writer’s book — about what they also pay Barnes and Noble to put a writer’s books at the front of the room. So the recommendation of the day isn’t an editorial judgment; it’s a commercial decision.
Amazon also has algorithms that determine what you are looking at when you go to their site, or to other online sites that they track. Like other online vendors, Amazon uses software that tells them where you looked on a page, even if you didn’t click a link there.
I think everyone in this room reads more or less the way I do. That is, in this room full of readers, we are looking for multiple points of view, not just our pet point of view. We want to know what new writers are doing, what experimental forms and stories they’re working with. We want access to older books, those that don’t bubble up by algorithm into the public consciousness.
Libraries that are putting their collections into remote storage say that they will have some books on the shelves — those that are most popular. If the works we have easiest access to are the winners of popularity contests, if American Idol is the model for the word made visible, we are losing our ability to be an informed and discerning people. We become easy prey to the drum beat summoning us to mob violence. We become easily swayed by lies. Like the Bellman in Hunting of the Snark, who proclaimed, “Anything I say three times is true”; we, too, are susceptible to believing repeated lies. In the run–up to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, we believed the repeated lie that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. We were easily incited by the President, Congress, and cable news into loud denunciations of France for opposing the invasion. These denunciations translated on the streets not just to the embarrassment of “Freedom Fries,” but to destruction of French property and assaults on French visitors.
We all have one or two fundamental questions about life — about our own lives — that we keep returning to, and trying to sort out. My own fundamental question has to do with how to act as a moral person in a world where peer pressure, market pressure, ambition, or cowardice make it easy to take the soft option.
Because of this, I’ve spent my life trying to understand cruelty, both the petty acts we all do from time to time, and the gross acts — Soviet gulags, Auschwitz, Rwanda that most of us pray we’ll never commit. I study people like Nelson Mandela, trying to learn how they survive extreme situations with their sense of personhood intact. Or how some tiny handfuls of people, like Jan and Antonia Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw zoo and his wife, were strong enough to risk death or torture by rescuing Jews in Nazi–occupied Poland. I read the poems of Akhmatova, who stood up to Stalin — even when he imprisoned her son, a naked statement of the power he had over every Russian’s life. I study the women of Birmingham, Alabama, who organized the bus boycott of 1956, and ignited the Civil Rights movement.
My concern about these issues also led me to follow the Chicago police torture story closely. This was the story of detective Jon Burge, who for nineteen years led a ring of Area II detectives in torturing suspects in custody. Hundreds of men were sentenced to long years in prison, some to the death penalty, based on coerced confessions.
Although Mayor Daley and a long list of Cook County State’s Attorneys were given evidence of the torture, they defended the cops until the statute of limitations on their crimes expired; the city paid over twenty–five million in legal fees, along with letting the men retire on full pensions. Burge is currently serving four and a half years in a federal pen for perjury, but will never do time for torture.
One figure who haunts me in this saga is Doris Byrd. Byrd, retired now with the rank of sergeant, says she used to hear the screams from the interview rooms when Burge’s team was on duty, and that suspects told her about having plastic bags put over their heads to suffocate them. They had electrodes and electric cattle prods inserted in their genitalia. They were chained naked to boiling hot radiators, where they suffered third degree burns.
Sergeant Byrd told the Chicago Reader she never reported the torture because it would have ended her police career. Burge and his detectives were all white men; the suspects they abused were all black. White male officers, like Frank Laverty — who spoke out against another similar situation — faced death threats from their fellow officers. Hard to know what would have happened to Byrd, who was not only female, but black.
I think of the people who stood silent when the pogrom or lynch mobs went by: not participating, but never speaking out. I fear that in any extreme situation, I would not be Akhmatova or Zabinska, but Sergeant Doris Byrd, shutting my eyes.
Ever since childhood, it’s been the fear of losing a sense of self that has terrified me, more than the fear of death. It’s the rotten effect of torture: you are humiliated, you are helpless, you become less than a person, you do what’s commanded even though it degrades you. You participate in your own humiliation. At Area II, Burge and his cohort forced men in custody to turn the crank on the field telephone they used to torture their victims.
I cannot bear for anyone to feel helpless. My private history has left me with a fierce commitment to lives lived on the margins, to people outside power structures, people who dont have the resources to fight back or to speak up. I am a figure on the sidelines, though: I write, I chronicle, but I retreat from personal confrontation.
In V. I. Warshawski I created a fictional detective who is often bruised, physically and emotionally, but never gives in. People ask if she’s my alter ego: she’s not. She’s my voice.
V. I. is a woman of action, but her primary role is to speak, to say those things that I’m not strong enough to say for myself. It is her speech, not her actions, that cause powerful people to rise up and try to stop her, even to obliterate her. But she will not be silenced.
I don’t start work on any novel thinking, “Oh, this book ought to have this message.” I think, “This is a story that’s interesting enough that I can live with it for one or two years.” Some ideas I have to abandon, because I can’t make the story small enough for a solo detective to manage. This is true, for example, of the world of big oil — it’s way too big for V. I. to tackle.
I’m not interested in writing propaganda novels, any more than I want to read them — that is, books written only to make a point — to show that four legs are better than two, or all males are testosterone–crazed villains, or women inevitably use their bodies to make good boys do bad things. There’s a reason that the writers we know from Stalin’s Russia are Pasternak and Akhmatova, not Gribachev, who wrote Spring in the Victory Collective Farm. Pasternak may have wanted to make a point, an ardently felt point, about human freedom, about the confusion that we feel in the midst of social upheavals, and how hard it is to know how to act. But he wanted to write about human beings caught up in events, not idealized political types — and that is my goal as well.
I aspire to write like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. Both were storytellers, first and foremost, but they wrote stories against the backdrop of poverty, homelessness, sweatshop labor, and the extreme disparities of wealth in Victorian England. If those master writers could include such topics in their stories, who am I to turn away from them?
In turbulent times like ours, I believe writers have an obligation to try to interpret the tea leaves, so to speak. I see great imbalances of power and wealth in the world around me. I see corruption on a breath–taking scale, along with other ills. I see the written word turning into junk as a trillion new bytes of content are churned out every minute. I think that these are fit subjects for a novel, despite the anger of a woman who wrote:
| “I used to enjoy your books until you became too political. I am tired of you thinking all rich people are evil. I resent your making them always the bad guys.” |
Sudanese storytellers, back when people in Sudan could live an ordinary life and listen to stories, would begin with a call and response to their audience:
I’m going to tell a story (right!) |
And that’s true of all stories. They’re made up, they’re fictions. In the case of crime novels, they’re mythical, almost: heroes vanquishing monsters. Theseus versus the wicked Minotaur, Marlowe versus the wicked temptress, V. I. Warshawski versus the wicked corporation, they’re all the same story.
But these fictions tell essential truths: the truth about our emotional lives, what we fear, what we want, what we need. I’ve always wanted to know the truth — that slippery, unknowable trickster — about myself for starters, and the past, and the stars, and how light a billion billion miles away can look like a jeweled piece of fruit that you might pluck from the night sky.
We live these days in a world of lies, secrets and silence, in the phrase of the poet Adrienne Rich, but we are starved for truth. We don’t hear it in the halls of government, or read it in the screaming blogosphere, or even in Oprah–sponsored memoirs. In such a time, we need fiction to tell us essential truths about life.
At its best, writing is a form of auto–surgery. The closer the novelist can cut to the bone, force herself to tell essential emotional truths, the more authentic will her voice become. V. I. doesn’t tell the truth in the sense that she is reporting a physics experiment that any other person could replicate.
But, like the Sudanese storyteller, what V. I. says isn’t false. She’s my voice in the world, the voice that keeps me from feeling helpless. She won’t accept the cheap, the shoddy, the mind–numbing lies and excuses wrapped up in shiny gilt paper to blind us into thinking we’ve seen gold.
I don’t know if books will survive, or Social Security or contraceptives or the Fourth Amendment. I hope it is my vision that will prevail, but I have no crystal ball. I’m in my sixties now. I don’t have, as Tennyson put it, the “strength which in old days moved heaven and earth.” All I have is hope; that, and my writer’s voice, which I came to in a hard way.
Thank you for traveling this road with me, and helping me keep up strength for the journey.
October 24 2012
Note
1. The title is an homage to Lawrence Towner, for many years Director of the Newberry Library in Chicago. This was a title he often used for his own lectures, and it was an sardonic reference to the tightening of the screws on library budgets.
About the author
Sara Paretsky is the bestselling author of the series of books featuring the female private eye V. I. Warshawski, and is a noted social justice and intellectual freedom advocate. In addition to writing fiction, she is a contributor to the New York Times and Guardian newspapers, and a speaker at venues such as the Library of Congress and Oxford University. Paretsky is an impassioned advocate for those on society’s margins, having worked as community organizer on Chicago’s South Side during the turbulent race riots of 1966 and more recently, serving with then state senator Obama the the board of Thresholds, which serves Chicago's mentally ill homeless. She is featured in the American Library Association’s “Our Authors, Our Advocates” campaign, which seeks to increase public awareness of the value of libraries, and is a frequent participant in Banned Books Week’s annual events celebrating the freedom to read.
© 2013 Sara Paretsky. All rights reserved.