While in college, he worked as a reporter for the local newspaper, the Waco Tribune-Herald, covering the police beat.
[5][6][7] At Baylor University, he met and married Harriet Anne Haley, a fellow student, in June 1961.
[7] His long-term domestic partner is Pace Barnes, a woman who, according to USA Today, "used to work in publishing and is as outgoing as he is quiet".
He loves cooking—he's done the Le Cordon Bleu exams—and it's great fun to sit with him in the kitchen while he prepares a meal and see that he's as happy as a clam.
"[9] In his first major interview in 43 years, with The New York Times in 2019 to promote Cari Mora, he revealed himself to be a nature lover, and a long-time visitor and volunteer of the Pelican Harbor Seabird Station, an animal rescue center in Miami, Florida, for 20 years.
The Guardian described it thus: "The Silence of the Lambs stands alone in being, I personally believe, the only FBI-centred novel worth reading."
The long-awaited Hannibal received high praise from Stephen King, but John Lanchester claimed that it had a "sense of discontinuity".