By Bonnie Adams, Managing Editor
Westborough – By her own admission, Hank Phillippi Ryan leads a double life. During the day she is an award-winning investigative journalist for Boston television station, Channel 7, WHDH. At night, she pursues another passion for which she has also won acclaim – as a fiction writer specializing in fast-paced mysteries.
As the guest speaker at the Aug. 20 monthly breakfast meeting of the Corridor Nine Area Chamber of Commerce breakfast held at the Doubletree Hotel, Ryan alternately charmed and inspired the audience with her moving personal stories of that double life.
But first she started off with a bit of advice.
“If there’s one thing I have learned,” she said, “is that you never know. You never know what unexpected or challenging thing is around the corner.”
“Don’t go with the flow,” she added. “Just see. Just see. Just see.”
That philosophy had informed her life from an early age, she noted, growing up as a “geeky, nerdy and unpopular girl” in Indiana.
As a child, she was an avid reader, she told the audience, often spending hours reading in the haystacks in her family’s barn. Then in 1971, as a young woman right out of college, she got a job at a radio station in spite of having no journalism experience simply because she pointed out to the station manager there were no women on staff at the time.
“I got the job because I was a woman but didn’t keep it because I was a woman,” she added. “I had to work harder and more passionately.”
That strong work ethic helped her pursue a career in television with stints at several other markets before she came to Boston in 1989. As Channel’s 7’s investigative reporter she has won 33 Emmy Awards and 13 Edward R. Murrow Awards for her investigative and consumer reporting. It wasn’t always easy, she said. There were times she was chased, threatened and harassed. But she was proud, she said, that the work she did on stories such as firehouse inspections and foreclosure fraud has been instrumental in getting laws passed that subsequently made a difference in the lives of many.
Now, as a novelist, Ryan has won a number of prestigious awards for her mystery novels, many of which were inspired by her work as a reporter and are set in New England locales.
“The stories are ripped from my own headlines,” she said.
A prolific writer, she has written eight books thus far – four books in the Charlotte McNally series; and four in the Jane Ryland series. Her latest, the fourth of the Ryland books, “What You See”, will be released Oct. 20.
“I am the poster child for following your dreams in mid-life,” she said of her incarnation as a novelist. “I am 65 now, I started writing at 55. Whatever you want to do, it’s not too late. Don’t wait – follow your dreams.”
“Every decision you make can be your ‘you never know’ day,” she added. “You have to be able to conquer your fear and take a chance.”
For more information on Ryan and her novels, visit her website www.hankphillippiryan.com.