Fearless freedom fighter

Sara Paretsky is one of the most respected and influential crime novelists of today, and this poignant and compelling personal testimony explains both the influences which made her a writer and the kind of writer she became. She was born in 1947 in Ames, Iowa, and grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, the only daughter in a Jewish family of five children. It was a world in which white Republican Protestants were the decision-makers, any questioning of their social mores provoking an aggressive reaction. Both parents were well educated and highly intelligent, both actively worked for social justice, but paradoxically kept their only daughter in emotional and educational subjection. From the age of seven she baked for her father and brothers every Saturday, cleaned the house and was a nanny to the younger boys. The sexual discrimination extended from major parental decisions to petty restrictions. Money was found to send her brothers to prestigious universities; she was forbidden to leave Kansas. Only her brothers could borrow the family car.

It is hardly surprising that she grew up to be a passionate advocate for her own sex and a doughty fighter for liberty and social justice. And she inherited from her parents and their forebears much that was good, a love of books and language and the importance of public service. But there was a darker inheritance. The shadow of the Holocaust, in which her entire European family had been annihilated even to the last infant cousin, lay like a heavy cloud over her childhood. Faced with the racial memory of this horror, any tendency to self-pity or the hurt of anti-Jewish jibes were minor evils to be stoically countered.

In 1966, accompanied by two friends, she volunteered to take part in a summer programme in Chicago and left Kansas, taking with her a passion for service and social justice with the energy and optimism of her generation.