Sara Paretsky interview: ‘I start each VI Warshawski book convinced I can’t do it’

The bestselling crime writer on hating femmes fatales, self doubt and creating a female character who refused to be silenced

‘My first book sold 3,500 copies; you’d never get a second with that now’ … Sara Paretsky. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Sarah Crown - The Guardian

In 2007, Sara Paretsky took time out from her day job as a crime writer to publish her memoir. Writing in an Age of Silence is brief but brilliant: a plea for the power of language, in which Paretsky sketches her passage from tyrannised child to acclaimed author, decries the then-incumbent Bush administration’s attacks on freedom of speech, and exhorts her readers to topple “those forces that seek to silence us, to rob us of our voices”. Along the way, she throws in a whistlestop tour of the civic crises of the American century (McCarthyism, civil rights, Roe v Wade) and speaks frankly about the skeletons in her own family closet. 
The whole thing comes together in an atmospheric jumble of personal testimony and polemic that swings along so engagingly it would be easy to miss the extraordinary confession she slips into the opening chapter. “I call myself a writer,” she says, halfway through a paragraph discussing the difficulties of coming of age in a male-dominated literary landscape. “But I do so without great conviction.”
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