The Officer’s Daughter: A Memoir of Family and Forgiveness
“Screen writer Johnson debuts with a beautiful and emotional memoir of a family tragedy. Assured prose bolsters the personal insights. This searing story deserves a wide readership.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
Elle Johnson
Executive Producer and co-showrunner on the Netflix limited series SELF MADE: INSPIRED BY THE LIFE OF MADAM CJ WALKER starring Octavia Spencer, who was nominated for an Emmy in the lead role. The show also won the 2021 N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for best limited series.
Most recently Elle was an Executive Producer on the Amazon Prime series BOSCH.
This is her first book.
“This fierce, probing memoir beautifully explores the powerful aftershocks of staggering loss. Elle Johnson has written a gift of a book—one that instructs and inspires even as it breaks your heart.”
—Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance
“The Officer’s Daughter is a masterpiece. More than that, it’s the perfect book for our troubled time. Johnson has written the deepest, most emotionally resonant understanding of forgiveness and justice I have ever read.”
—Darin Strauss, bestselling author of Half a Life
Book Synopsis
When Elle Johnson was 16 years old, her cousin Karen, also 16, had her face blown off at point blank range in a robbery gone wrong at the Burger King in the Bronx where she was working. 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. Her aunt a probation 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.
