E-mail a friendTess Gerritsen
airdate November 9, 2006
Tess Gerritsen transitioned from successful internist to best-selling author. In '87, her first romantic thriller was published, followed by eight more. She also wrote a screenplay, Adrift, which aired as a CBS 'Movie of the Week.' In '95, Gerritsen opted to use her insider's knowledge of the medical profession to lend her books authenticity. Her first medical suspense novel, Harvest, was a New York Times best seller and translated into 20 foreign languages. Her newest is The Mephisto Club.
Tess Gerritsen
Tavis: Tess Gerritsen was a practicing physician in Hawaii for years when, during a maternity leave, she decided to try her hand at writing. Turned out to be a really good decision, Tess, because over the past 10 years, she's placed nine books on 'The New York Times' best seller list, including her first medical thriller, 'Harvest.' Her latest book, no surprise, debuted near the top of that same 'Times' list. It's called 'The Mephisto Club.' And Tess Gerritsen, it's nice to have you on the program.
Tess Gerritsen: Thank you for having me.
Tavis: My honor. I know for your true, long-term fans, they perhaps by now know the story of how you went from being a - well, once a physician, always a physician, I guess.
Gerritsen: Right.
Tavis: A practicing physician to being a 'New York Times' best-selling writer. Tell me about journey, how that happened.
Gerritsen: Well, it was really because I had two young children, and could not find childcare. So I decided I was gonna stay home for a while and do what I'd always wanted to do ever since I was a child, which was tell stories. And I ended up writing romances to begin with.
Tavis: Wow. Did you ever think in your life as a physician that the opportunity to do what you've always wanted to do would ever present itself in such a way?
Gerritsen: No, never. I think that real writers will write regardless of whether they think they're gonna sell or not, and I just wanted to tell stories. So I kept writing and writing, and eventually got to the point where I wrote that first 'New York Times' best-selling thriller.
Tavis: Why medicine, if what you really wanted to do from a child on up was to write?
Gerritsen: Because I'm also fascinated by science. And ever since I was a little girl, I did things like dissect animals, dead animals that I would find in the canyon. I'm fascinated by biology in particular, especially the creepy side of science. Anything that would give me a chill, I wanted to know more about it.
Tavis: Yeah. So when you sit down to write - and I wanna talk about this in just a second. But when you sit down to write these bestsellers, you start with the notion that science is going to be somewhere in there, or you write the book and then look at it a second time and find a way to weave the science in? Or some other process?
Gerritsen: The way I start a book is that I find an idea or premise that gives me the creeps. (Laugh) I think I always pay attention to my own sort of gut feelings. And if something fascinates me or raises some emotion, I know that that's gonna be my next book.
Tavis: Tell me about 'The Mephisto Club.' I know it's the follow-up, of course, to 'Vanish.'
Gerritsen: Yes, it's the sixth in a crime series starring a detective named Jane Rizzoli and a medical examiner named Maura Isles. It was inspired by something I came across when I was in Oxford, England. It was a translation of an ancient religious text that was written about 200 years before Christ, called the 'Book of Enoch.' Now, Enoch is the great-grandfather of Noah, and it talked about strange beings, demons, if you want to call them that, who resulted from the mating of fallen angels and human women.
And they're called the Nephilim, which translated from Hebrew means simply the fallen. These Nephilim were mostly destroyed by God in Noah's time, but according to another ancient religious text called the 'Book of Jubilees,' one-tenth of them is still walking among us, still intermarrying with humans, still passing along this sort of evil bloodline. These creatures supposedly cause a great deal of violence and damage and heartbreak. And through history, if you believe the Israelite legends, they are responsible for a great deal of bloodshed throughout our history.
Tavis: I was just thinking, you were telling that, I'd get myself in too much trouble. There's so many one-liners (laugh) that you invite me to share about evil people walking the earth and mating and bringing all kind of evil on the earth in this political season, but I'll leave that alone, Tess.
Gerritsen: We could talk about that, too. (Laugh)
Tavis: You left me way too wide open on that one. Let me stick with the text, and keep myself out of trouble on public broadcasting. That said, tell me how that weaves itself, that Enoch book weaves itself into the storyline.
Gerritsen: Well, I'm interested in biblical literature. I happen to be an Agnostic, myself. But maybe that is why I'm so interested.
Tavis: I wanna get into that. Go ahead.
Gerritsen: Why I'm so interested in religious texts. And I thought, what if the Israelites actually were just misinterpreting what they saw? What if there's a biological explanation for their belief that there are different creatures living among us? What if they were seeing sort of the genetic basis for sociopathic behavior? Perhaps there is something genetic about people who commit acts of violence, or who are particularly bad? Maybe that would explain somebody like Adolf Hitler, or Vlad the Impaler, that they are descendents from this bloodline of the Nephilim.
Tavis: Tell me more about your Agnosticism, and how, if you don't mind talking about it, how it is that reality impacts your work. Your curiosity about your work, if, in fact, it does.
Gerritsen: I think it does. I'm, I've always, well, as I told you that I am a physician, and I've been trained in science. So I think that, in a way, affects how I view religious beliefs. I also grew up in I guess what you'd call a paranormal household. My mother is from China, an immigrant, and she saw ghosts growing up in China as a child. So she belonged to the Parapsychology Society of San Diego.
She used to bring home some very strange characters for dinner. People who would go into a trance over the dinner table, and conduct impromptu séances. So I was surrounded by...
Tavis: This is your life as a child.
Gerritsen: This is my life as a child.
Tavis: Wow.
Gerritsen: So I was surrounded by people who had odd beliefs. And I think that's why I grew up a skeptic. (Laugh)
Tavis: When you say - I accept the word skeptic, but when you say people who had odd beliefs, one watching right now could think that's a strange kind of childhood to have for one who ends up being as well adjusted as you are. How did you navigate that kind of lifestyle as a child? I can see you getting screwed up that way, though.
Gerritsen: I think I've always felt of myself as a bit of a scientist, so I think I stepped back and looked at these people who were psychics and spiritual mediums. And even at a young age was asking myself, is this for real? Who are these people? It turned out they were all very nice, eccentric people, but it made me grow up a questioner about everything.
Tavis: Your mother did or did not speak English?
Gerritsen: She spoke a little bit of English, and another odd thing about my childhood is that she really loved horror films.
Tavis: Wow.
Gerritsen: And so I spent a great deal of my childhood screaming in movie theaters. (Laugh)
Tavis: So your mother doesn't speak fluent English, but she obviously gets what she's seeing on the screen.
Gerritsen: Yeah. (Laugh) Horror movies don't always require any kind of translation, do they?
Tavis: Exactly, yeah.
Gerritsen: There's a monster on there. And I think one other thing that has interested me about evil is when I was about 12 years old, we had a very good family friend who would come to our house for dinner. A man. He would come to our house for dinner with his mother, and one Sunday, he came over. It was a normal visit, I thought. And he went home and was arrested.
It turned out he'd come to our house a couple of hours after murdering his sister-in-law. He had killed her by shoving her head into a toilet bowl and drowning her. And even now, all these years later, I keep thinking back. Was there anything different about him that day? And I don't remember anything. So I think that I learned this lesson then that you can't always identify evil. You can't always identify a killer, which is really the theme for most mystery novels, is the fact that killers are hidden from us.
Tavis: I was fascinated reading about you in preparing for our conversation to learn in one of your articles where you suggested that many of your fans tell you they want even more of what you are giving them. More of the gore. Tell me what your fans tell you as you move around the country.
Gerritsen: Well, the real reason I started writing crime fiction from medical thrillers was a fan who had told me she wasn't interested in my previous book, which was about the space program. She said, 'I want you to write a book about something I am interested in.' And I said, 'What's that?' And she said, 'Serial killers, and twisted sex.' (Laugh) And I asked her, 'What do you do for a living?' And she said, 'I teach.' And I said, 'What do you teach?' And she said, 'The third grade.' (Laugh)
Tavis: Wow.
Gerritsen: So I went home and started thinking more about third grade teachers and this appetite for serial killer books, and discovered there is an almost inexhaustible appetite, particularly among women readers. They like to be scared. They like to - they identify with the victim more than any other character in the stories. Why? I think it's because maybe we, as women, feel vulnerable. And this is our way of effacing our fears. We just, we, we can do it safely, within the confines of a novel.
Tavis: That was a fascinating story I read, and she's a third grade teacher, I was, like, whoa. That kind of got my attention (laugh) real fast. Speaking of women, is it just me, or are you, like, the only - you are certainly the top of the heap, if you're not the only Asian American mystery writer. That's like a genre that you own, and maybe one that you created.
Gerritsen: I'm not really aware of that many who are best-selling thriller writers, at least. I haven't run across any. So I'm not sure why. I think that if you look at who gets published, there are actually very few Asian novelists. Publishing in the United States, anyway. Whether it's because culturally we were raised to go into engineering or medicine. (Laugh) That could be part of it.
Tavis: I wonder whether or not you think that that reality, who you are, brings anything, informs in any way, the work that you do in these thrillers?
Gerritsen: Well, I think that I always write from, with this perspective of being the outsider. And as an Asian, I was the only Asian girl in my elementary school class. So I've always felt that I didn't quite belong. And I think my characters often have that same sense, that they don't really belong. And you know, it's surprising, how everybody has that same feeling. It doesn't matter whether the wispiest, richest, most blonde girl in high school. When you talk to anybody, they all have that sense of, they don't belong.
Tavis: Somewhere.
Gerritsen: Somewhere.
Tavis: Yeah.
Gerritsen: And I think that that's, that's what connects with them, emotionally.
Tavis: Is that healthy or unhealthy?
Gerritsen: I don't know if it's either. I think it's just a reality.
Tavis: Yeah. Where do you go from here, after this?
Gerritsen: Oh, I'm writing a historical thriller, set in 1830s Boston, starring a very famous physician in (unintelligible) of medical school, Oliver Wendell Holmes. And it takes into this the milieu of how horrifying medicine was in the early 1800s. Imagine trying to do an amputation with no anesthesia.
Tavis: No anesthesia, yeah.
Gerritsen: All you could do is hold them down and listen to them scream. So into that whole atmosphere, there is a serial killer story.
Tavis: I think you figured out that thrillers is your bailiwick. That's what you.
Gerritsen: I think it is. I think I'm very good at paying attention to what I'm afraid of. And what I'm afraid of, it turns out, is what most people are afraid of.
Tavis: Well, Tess Garrison, speaking of afraid, I'm scared of you. You're back on 'The New York Times' best seller list. The book is called 'The Mephisto Club.' 'The New York Times' best-selling author Tess Gerritsen's latest work. Nice to have you on the program.
Gerritsen: Thank you very much.
Tavis: Up next, Grammy-winning blues musician, Robert Cray. Stay with us.
Back to November 9, 2006