Elizabeth Flock
Elizabeth Flock was obsessed with the news. As a correspondent for CBS News, she travelled the world to feed her hunger for the big story of the day. The handover of Hong Kong from British rule back to China, 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 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. Elizabeth's book But Inside I'm Screaming takes the reader into a fictionalised fight for sanity.
Soon after returning from living abroad in London, Elizabeth 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. After five years of print reporting, Elizabeth 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 mobile phone and began working on the ulcer that would ultimately slow her down and change her life.
By 1998 Elizabeth knew she could no longer make the sacrifice required of a rising network star and instead chose the peaceful life of writing. Her debut novel Me & Emma became a bestseller, with over 100,000 copies sold in the UK.
A graduate of Vanderbilt University, Elizabeth is married, has two stepdaughters, four cats and a dog and lives in Chicago.