And you love to read, you love to escape, right?

Anything less than total candor was bullshit. I owed that to my readers, I owed that to myself, and I owed that most specifically to my mother. I've had some thrilling moments in my 18-year literary career to this point, and nothing comes close to giving Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, the farm girl from Tunnel City, Wisconsin, to the world.

For a much lauded writer, I'm not terribly self-absorbed. In social situations, which are difficult for me - I mean, this is an interview - I'm normally uncomfortable talking about myself.

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

I've created a narrative of the world. I live in the world - tenuously, most times. I've avoided the digital world.

My role relationship to the event will continue to mutate. My relationship to my mother will continue to change as I revise my judgments of her depending on what I learn about her. It goes on. But I feel no less obsessive about my work and no less passionately committed to the life I have now, but I feel poised inside. Which is a good thing to feel at 48.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.