Patricia Morrisroe grew up in Andover, Massachusetts and graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in English literature. After spending a year as a reporter and film critic at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, she received an M.A. in Cinema Studies at NYU. She worked for several years at Ziff-Davis Publishing Company before becoming a freelance magazine writer. Her articles about movies appeared in Parade. Throughout the 1980s, she was a contributing editor at New York magazine, where she wrote over fifty features, including a dozen cover stories. She identified many of the key cultural and social trends of the day, writing one of the first magazine stories about single mothers by choice, as well as the rise of the “home computer.” Reflecting the city’s diversity, she profiled fashion designers, politicians, movie stars, restaurateurs, as well as a group of elderly women, who subsisted on food from the trash bin at a local gourmet shop and artists priced out of Manhattan. As one of the early mainstream magazine writers to focus on AIDS, she wrote a cover story on the death of the fashion designer Perry Ellis at a time when his own company denied his illness. She went on to write three more features on the growing epidemic and the lives it impacted.

In addition to her work at New York, Morrisroe has also written for Vanity Fair, Vogue, Departures, Travel & Leisure, Elle Décor, and the London Sunday Times Magazine, where she profiled the writer Raymond Carver and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1988, Mapplethorpe, who had AIDS, selected her to write his biography. He died a year later, before the Corcoran Gallery of Art set off a firestorm of controversy when it cancelled the photographer’s “The Perfect Moment” exhibit. This spurred a heated nationwide debate about pornography as art and called into question the extent to which Congress and the NEA should be funding that art. When Mapplethorpe: A Biography was published in 1995, the art critic Arthur C. Danto, in The Nation, called it “utterly admirable…The clarity and honesty of Morrisroe’s portrait are worthy of its subject.”