But Inside I'm Screaming (Mira Hardbacks)

From the New York Times bestselling author of Me & Emma

comes one woman’s unforgettable story about what it is to lose control

as the world watches, and to figure out what went so very wrong.

While breaking the hottest news story of the year, broadcast journalist Isabel Murphy falls apart on live television in front of an audience of millions. She lands at Three Breezes, a four-star psychiatric hospital nicknamed the “nut hut,” where she begins the painful process of recovering the life everyone thought she had.

But accepting her place among her fellow patients proves difficult, and Isabel struggles to reconcile the fact that she is, indeed, one of them. As she faces the reality that in order to mend her painfully fractured life she must rely solely on herself, she must also accept an imperfect life in a world that demands perfection.

As a correspondent for CBS News she traveled the world to feed her hunger for the big story of the day. The handover of Hong Kong from British rule back to the Chinese, the historic meeting between Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro in Havana, Cuba, and London’s reaction to the death and funeral of Princess Diana -- Flock covered them all. In between there were plane crashes, race riots, floods and famine. Few knew that while she was jetting from one breaking news story to another she was battling clinical depression.

Network correspondents will be the first to tell of the personal sacrifice that’s made to follow the story, to beat the competition. Marriages crumble, children grow estranged, friendships wither. Few, though, talk about the inward struggle to stay sane in the middle of chaos. But Inside I'm Screaming takes the reader into a fictionalized fight for sanity.

Soon after returning from living abroad in London, Elizabeth Flock landed in San Francisco reporting for both Time and People magazines. While she was at Time her work included several cover stories, one investigating Chinese gang activity, another on the current movement toward the preservation of marriage, a third on the fiery siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. For People Flock covered many Bay Area stories, among them the Ellie Nesler story of a mother who shot and killed the man suspected of molesting her son. After five years of print reporting, Flock was drawn to television. Soon she was anchoring and reporting at a 24-hour cable network based in San Francisco and writing for the NBC affiliate news station.

But New York beckoned and, after a freelance stint covering the crash of TWA Flight 800 for CBS, she was hired, handed a beeper and cell phone and began working on the ulcer that would ultimately slow her down and change her life.

By 1998 Flock knew she could no longer make the sacrifice required of a rising network star and instead chose the peaceful life of writing. But Inside I'm Screaming is her first novel.

A graduate of Vanderbilt University, Elizabeth Flock is married, has two stepdaughters, four cats and a dog and lives in Chicago. She is currently working on her second novel.

Copyright © 2003 Elizabeth Flock