Q&A: Cornelia Read
By Andi Shechter, Seattle -- Library Journal, 5/1/2006
Like Madeline Dare, the heroine of her debut mystery, A Field of Darkness, Cornelia Read is an old-school WASP. Raised by divorced hippie-renegade parents, she is a former debutante and sports a tattoo on her ankle (a treat from her mother). Read's next book is set at a boarding school for emotionally disturbed teenagers, similar to one she taught at years ago.
Most of us have only encountered the WASP/Mayflower type in fiction like The Great Gatsby. How real are the amazing people you write about?
I tried very hard to make all my characters true-to-life, but it was especially important to me to portray the WASP/Mayflower characters with as much accuracy as fiction could withstand. They've mostly been depicted as one of two stock types: Snidely Whiplash villains or Richie Rich and Thurston Howell. There's a nugget of truth at the heart of those images, but they're not the whole picture.
Someone wrote that The Grapes of Wrath fell short because Steinbeck made no attempt to understand “the bosses”—he just presumed they were irredeemably evil and left them off the page. There's a boatload of irredeemable evil in my ancestry, but I wanted to make sense of it—to “trace the flaw down the barrel of the generations,” as my protagonist Madeline Dare says.
In that case, how do you think your family will respond to A Field of Darkness? Will they recognize themselves?
Luckily, the most vicious ones are dead and weren't widely loved to begin with. So far my relatives have been amused, but I wouldn't be surprised to find a few lumps of coal in my stocking this Christmas.
You've written a range of nonfiction, essays, articles, reviews. When did you decide you wanted to write a mystery?
When it hit me that mysteries offered the most evocative writing, the most powerful characterizations, insights, and images that continued to resonate long after I'd finished reading. I just wasn't getting that juice from literary fiction. To me, mystery's where the mojo lives these days. I don't think good crime fiction “transcends the genre”—I think it transcends Harold Bloom.
Has it set in yet that you've got a book coming out this month and that you're touring with Lee Child?
No, especially getting to tour with Lee. I keep saying it's like somebody's dosing my coffee with acid. Luckily, it's good acid.
How, with two school-age kids, do you ever find the time to write?
I'm blessed that both my kids have great schools and great after-school programs—especially for my younger daughter, who has severe autism. Their teachers are my heroes. Without them, I couldn't have started a novel, much less finished one.
