Fauna Hodel Books in Order

Fauna Hodel was born in San Francisco, California, on August 1, 1951. Her life began with a family secret that she would spend years trying to understand, and that search eventually became the heart of her writing.

As a baby, Fauna was placed with Jimmie Lee Greenwade, a Black woman who raised her in the Reno, Nevada, area. She grew up using the name Patricia Ann Greenwade, often called Pat, and believed she was biracial because of the information recorded about her birth. That belief shaped how she saw herself and how others treated her.

For much of her childhood, the truth was out of reach.

Fauna's birth mother was Tamar Hodel, who was 16 when Fauna was born. When Fauna began looking for Tamar as a young adult, she learned that her biological family was white and that she was connected to Dr. George Hodel, Tamar's father. The family history also led her toward the still-unsolved 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia case. George Hodel was investigated as a suspect but was never charged.

Those discoveries did not give Fauna a neat ending. They gave her more questions about family, race, secrecy, and belonging. Her story moves between the hard realities of her upbringing and her later effort to build a relationship with Tamar while facing what the Hodel family history might mean.

She first brought parts of that experience to the screen through Pretty Hattie's Baby, a 1991 film that was not released. Fauna served as an executive producer and creative consultant on the project. She also worked as a motivational speaker, using her own experiences to talk about racial equality, identity, and human connection.

Then she put the story on the page.

In 2008, she and J. R. Briamonte published One Day She'll Darken: The Mysterious Beginnings of Fauna Hodel. The memoir combines a personal search for origins with true-crime history, but its center is Fauna herself: a daughter trying to make sense of the people who raised her, the mother she did not know, and the records that obscured her past. The book was republished in 2019 and later inspired the limited television series I Am the Night.

Fauna was the mother of two daughters, Yvette Gentile and Rasha Pecoraro. She remained involved with the television adaptation of her story before her death from breast cancer on September 30, 2017. Her daughters later continued exploring the family's history in their own work, keeping the questions at the center of Fauna's memoir alive for new audiences.