Biography

Patricia Morrisroe is an author and journalist whose work spans biography, memoir, and historical fiction. In 1988, Robert Mapplethorpe selected Morrisroe to write his biography. After his death, the Corcoran Gallery of Art canceled the photographer’s The Perfect Moment exhibition, igniting a national debate over federal funding of “objectionable” art.

Published in 1995 to widespread attention, Mapplethorpe: A Biography was translated into eight languages. Writing in The Nation, art critic Arthur C. Danto called the biography “utterly admirable,” citing “the clarity and honesty” of Morrisroe’s portrait. Her Mapplethorpe archive is held by the Cornell University Library.

Morrisroe followed Mapplethorpe with Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia, which combined science, cultural history, and personal experience. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin singled out Morrisroe’s “deadpan funny” sense of humor and called the book a “fine firsthand look at insomniac eccentricities.” In 9½ Narrow: My Life in Shoes, Morrisroe used a lifetime of footwear to write about fashion, identity, and the mother who shaped both. The Wall Street Journal noted her talent for “funny and keenly observed details.”

Morrisroe later turned to fiction with The Woman in the Moonlight, a historical novel set in nineteenth-century Vienna and centered on Giulietta Guicciardi, Beethoven’s young piano student, to whom he dedicated the Moonlight Sonata.

Earlier in her career, Morrisroe was a contributing editor at New York magazine, where she wrote more than fifty features, including two dozen cover stories. Her journalism has also appeared in The New York Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, and Departures.

Morrisroe’s most recent project is the play The Starlet Beauty Bar.