Hometown girl feted

Laura Lippman, fresh off a very nice write-up in the New York Times, gets similar treatment by her former employer (and my current one) The Baltimore Sun. There’s the requisite biographical info (including a brief mention of her first published work, which I’ve read–or at least, I think I did) her work ethic, and what ultimately drives her to keep writing:

“I’m having this chance to live the life that I’ve always wanted to live,” she says. “I will do what I have to do to keep this life going.”

She said her drive does not come from a desire to make money, top the Times best-seller list or please literary critics. It’s more to prove to herself and to others she says doubted her that she has always had what it takes to be a successful writer.

“I write from a place of anger,” Lippman says in an e-mail. “A desire to have the last word, which means, I guess, that I’ll write the rest of my life. Because no one ever, ever has the last word.”

How true that is, though people keep on trying to do so.