Lisa Scottoline: Confessions of a Library Slut

"I am a library slut," admitted mystery author Lisa Scottoline. "That means I will go to any library that will have me," to give thanks to librarians, who changed the direction of her life. Scottoline, an Edgar Award-winner for her 1994 novel Final Appeal (HarperTorch), ebulliently told her Monday-morning Auditorium Speaker Series audience that she grew up in a household that only had one book—TV Guide. It wasn't until she went to her school library that she found out that not only did some books have hard covers, she joked, but "they didn't all have Lucille Ball on them." Soon Scottoline moved on to public libraries, which she said were "like hardware stores for girls: You spend hours in them, you get lost, and you don't mind." She still vividly remembers her orange library card, even its number—3935. Testifying to the "profound love and gratitude" she has for libraries and librarians, Scottoline recalled, "That card said to me, 'I read, therefore I matter.'" Scottoline said she started writing in the 1980s "because I wasn't seeing the women in books that I was seeing in life." At that time, women in fiction were still in subordinate roles, she observed, "still the Della Streets to Perry Mason."  "I'm writing about, strong interesting women," Scottoline said, such as the members of the all-woman law firm Rosato and Associates. "What I'm trying to do is very much like what you're doing," she told the assembled librarians. When people pick up a book, she explained, they're looking for a connection to someone like them, "and that's why what you do is so essential—because you're making a connection. What you do is to connect us to each other. I don't think there is a greater good in this world."