Her awards include the Pulitzer Prize for best feature writing.
She lives with her husband Steven Levy in New York's Greenwich Village.
She is the author of four books: Without a Doubt (1997) (with Marcia Clark), a New York Times #1 bestseller, Missing Beauty (1988), a New York Times bestseller, and The Miss Stone Affair (2003).
[citation needed] Arlyne Brickman, the Mafia informant and mob moll, was the subject of Carpenter's non-fiction book Mob Girl: A Woman's Life in the Underworld (1992) published by Simon & Schuster.
Carpenter was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer in Feature Writing for her account of model Dorothy Stratten's death, after it was revealed that the original winning article, "Jimmy's World", by Janet Cooke of The Washington Post, was a fabrication.