Elle Johnson on Researching Memoir, Weaving Story Threads, Finding Theme, and The Officer’s Daughter

Elle Johnson is a TV writer. Her credits include Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Ghost Whisperer, and The Fosters. One of Elle’s career highlights came on The Glades where she wrote and produced an episode set in the world of NASCAR that featured nine actual racecars, four champion drivers, and one monkey. She was co-showrunner on Netflix’s Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam CJ Walker which won an NAACP Image award for best limited series. Most recently she was an Executive Producer on the Amazon original series Bosch, based on the Michael Connelly detective novels. Originally from Hollis, Queens Elle graduated from Harvard College, studied writing on a Rotary Scholarship at the University of East Anglia in England, and has taken numerous classes at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She was a finalist for UCLA’s 2015 Allegra Johnson Prize in Memoir Writing. The Officer’s Daughter is her first book.
SYNOPSIS
When Elle Johnson was 16 years old, her 16 year-old cousin Karen had her face blown off at point blank range in a robbery at a Burger King in the Bronx. Elle comes from a family of black law enforcement officers. Her uncle, Karen's dad, was a homicide detective. Her father was a parole officer. The aftermath of Karen's murder, the cross-country manhunt spearheaded by the NYPD and the FBI to find the killers, and the subsequent trials and media circus, marked the defining end of Elle's childhood innocence.
Thirty years later, living in Los Angeles, writing for various television shows (including several police procedurals), Elle receives an email from Karen's brother notifying her that one of the killers is up for parole. Asked to write a letter encouraging the parole board not to set him free Elle realizes that before she can write a letter condemning a man she's never met, she must also investigate the hard truths of her own past: family who never really spoke of the devastating effect the murder of her young cousin had on any of them, with secrets of their own, and a complicated father she never truly understood. The Officer's Daughter is the story of a family, a terrible tragedy, and the power--and ultimately the freedom--of forgiveness.