Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth In Depth With Jodi Picoult 20240712

They just have kept it to themselves. To can be completely honest when i was listening to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing i was thinking a lot about these women. When women dont tell their stories a narrative is visited upon them, one of blame and shame. You did something wrong. You should have known better. I think that to me is the most resonant message from this book, to take back the narrative, the stigma, have to normalize it. One of four women terminate a pregnancy in the course of her lifetime. Putting a face to that instead of casting women as selfish and evil is important in a way to take the narrative back. Host you observe actual abortions. What was that like . Guest we shouldnt talk about abortion and euphemism. Interrupting life process even if you are prochoice you have to recognize that and he feels we should acknowledge that and what was being done during the termination. Invited me into the room to observe a 5week abortion and an 8 week abortion and a 16 week abortion. It was quite a privilege to be there with women who were going through a difficult moment, let me interview them before and after and i can tell you the 5 weekend a week abortion took less then three minutes, the product of conception were nothing more than if you blow your nose in a tissue and peek inside of it. The 15 week abortion was a little different. It took 7 minutes. Mixed among the mucus and products of conception was a tiny and very humanlike, a small hand, that was shocking to see. Interviewing women who had the termination she had three children under the age of four, she could barely afford to freedom. If she had a fourth she would not be enough to feed them. It does that make her a good mother or a bad mother. Host you are prochoice. How did you find that . Guest janine is a prolife protester usually outside the clinic but on this particular day, she has gone into the clinic pretending to be a patient so she can secretly take the workers into saying something in common aiding to put on the internet. Janine is a character who does exist. Every Abortion Provider i spoke with for research had multiple women who are protesters on their own table having an abortion or not just having an abortion is going out the next day to continue protesting. Janine was the voice of someone who is prolife. I did that due diligence, people who identify as prolife. I went in with misconceptions assuming these people must be very evangelical, zealous, i would have nothing in common with them. They were funny, smart, interesting. We had wonderful conversations but disagreed on one important point which is where does life begin and for me it hammered home that we have more in common with people who think different from us than we have not in common with them but these people come from a place of deep compassion and deep conviction like i would. They wouldnt want to be seen as antiwoman anyone as prochoice, you never want to hear women use abortion as Birth Control because that is not true either. There are misconceptions on both sides of the aisle. Host a very topical story in a page turner sort of way. Guest dont know how you find that balance except by doing it for a long time. I love the concept of the novel as a way to educate about social justice because i think for example when i wrote this book i read countless studies about reproductive rights and abortion statistics. Most people dont sit down and do that but they might pick up a novel and you think you are picking up a book to be entertained, you think youre picking up a book that will whisk you away for a few hours but a 5 done my job right by the end you think hard about a topic you might otherwise not have approached. In that way fiction is so wonderfully sneaky because it gets peoples minds to crack wide open. Host 1. 2 million abortions happened in the 1950s. Guest and every reason to believe if robie wade is overturned we will have abortions, they will just be unsafe and women will be in more danger. It is important to recognize this as a fact i didnt know until i started researching the book. 97 of the work planned parenthood and other clinics to has nothing to do with abortions. That is why it is federally funded. It is Womens Healthcare, cancer screenings and women in poverty use clinics to get that healthcare. Only 3 of that business is abortion and the only part of the clinics that fund itself. Federal funding does not cover abortions. If you get when you have to pay for it which means if we defund planned parenthood all they will do is abortion care which is not what protesters mean when they say defund planned parenthood. They think they will stop abortions. Host are Abortion Services profitable . I would not say they are profitable. No one will make a living but what they do is pay for themselves, cover their own costs because there are no federal funds that are allocated to that. What you want to doing if you get rid of them. Host before we started in studio, talking about your tour of england and questions men would ask. Host i didnt get that many questions for men but in england i had multiple men at events who would ask me did you talk to the men helping make this decision and the answer was no, i never spoke specifically to men because i was interviewing the women who have the procedures but in the course of the interview i asked about their partners and i found out the vast majority told their partners they were pregnant or in cases where that didnt happen it was usually rape or incest or the man had left the scene and wasnt involved anymore. What i did find out was men were particularly supportive when they paid for half the abortion or went in with her to the procedure, the women felt very alone and isolated. Even though they recognized their partner was trying to connect the predominant 5 with you dont understand it is happening to me and not you. Host maybe i shouldnt do this but all the books of yours that i read, i tried to find a character you identify with. I found in this one, am i way off . Guest yes. That is a really interesting character. Beth is in many ways the future of america could be in a post roe v wade world, a young girl who has run out of options, gone to get a judicial waiver, something happens with the judge who can to be there today and it is already pass the legal limit to get an abortion in the state of mississippi so she takes matters into her own hands and ordering online which is illegal and in many states, personhood statutes come into play. There is one in the ballots in alabama on tuesday. If you try to facilitate your own abortion you can be tried for murder which is what is happening to beth. I dont see myself as best, but i dont know what that means. At the clinic, obviously not to get an abortion because shes 70 and is there for other healthcare and specifically to point out the reason people go to these clinics is not just abortion care. She is smart and the beating heart of the book. If i could be anyone in the book it would be the Abortion Provider. Host want to show the cover of it, looking at this, ask people what they think the cover. What do you think . Guest it is beautiful. Looks like an impressionist painting and the more you look at it. The more you recognize the faces of women caught in a melange of colors. I thought it was an interesting interpretation of the material inside. It doesnt bother me it is pastel colors which we would consider more feminine because it is about womens Reproductive Health. Host if i were walking past that book in the airport unless i was familiar with you i wouldnt stop. Guest that isnt always a function of the color. There is, i have been quite outspoken about it, theres a huge gender bias in publishing and we see it in the marketing but that cover it self would never be a chiclet book. It would have a cartoon cover or disembodied womans body part or Something Like that. That is too highbrow. There is intense gender discrimination in publishing because of a group that has done the numbers every year, and they see how many female authors are reviewed by particular review outlets and look and see how many women are reviewers at these outlets and since they began years ago they look at people of color and people with disabilities, nonbinary authors and they start to see how white and male driven publishing is and the statistics have been remarkable and upheld 66 of book buyers are women, read men and women, men tends to readonly men and part of that is the marketing to you, part of it is that very often women are called womens fiction authors when i argue not a lot i write about would fall in the womans fiction category. Often if one is called a womens fiction author it has less to do than what is between the covers and between in the authors legs. I offer as an example small small great things does not have a kiss and it and won best romance novel in poland. I have no idea. It makes me fear for the future of romance in poland. Host you were quoted in the New York Times saying i dont mind the term chiclet. I dont write it. It is funny when people assume i do because i have a vaginae. Guest totally true. If i write chiclet, sorry if youre picking up my books but that is supposed to be a fun beach read, something with humor is it. If i write about the holocaust that would not be my choice for chiclet book. I love light fiction. I love genre fiction. I read widely and i think there is a place for that for all kinds of genre fiction. All women right womens fiction is silly. There was a point that amazon, wikipedia decided to break out womens authors from american novelists but there was a huge uproar because they took all the women out of the american novelist page. If you want to have a subcategory i am all for that but keep the women for the american novelist too. Host was the thought process lets make sure they get featured or just guest nobody can focus but the problem then, when you accept the group, you make them a subset. Host any idea how many of your readers are women . Guest i tracked it for three months contract my fan mail and i can tell you 50 of my fan mail comes from men and they often write and say im sure im the only man reading your book because you have been conditioned as men to read mail authors. I go be securing your masculinity. I hear from many men. I love when men read my stuff because they take Different Things from my novel than women do. I encourage men watching the program go to your bookshelf and do you read a female author for every male author you read, you will find you dont and that is something you should change. While the references to astronomy in a spark of light . One of the coolest facts, looking into the past, it goes chronologically backward, what people believe about controversial topics, something we find the needs of our parents, friends, our own personal experience, the Hostage Negotiator is a single dad, looking at stars, it felt like the perfect metaphor for this book. Host where does the title come from . Guest it is not the original title of the book. My publisher didnt like the original title and for a month host tell us what that was . Guest moment of conception. It wasnt about where life begins as where belief begins but they felt that was too clinical so we went back and forth and they tried to give me other titles and i hated all of the mans my amazing fabulous editor called me, she had been on a flight and read something in an inflight magazine about a study that had been done by a scientist in the midwest about the moment sperm fertilizes an egg under a highpowered microscope you can see a flash of light and it is the zinc in the side of the egg giving way to the sperm causing a spark. What is great about it is they have ascertained the bigger the sparkle more healthy the embryo is. You can imagine how that will have unbelievable ramifications for people who do in vitro because you only have a certain number of embryos, who knows which one will stick . The healthiest ones are in place. I was thinking about that and my fictional doctor who is modeled after willie parker, the universe beginning with life and then there was light and reading a biological essay about the spark of life that happened to the fertilization moment between sperm and egg and i can make this work. Host are you a big enough seller with your bestselling books that you can determine what the title of your book is . Guest they usually show me a cover and i will say if i like or dont like it. That was not the original cover for a spark of light. The original looked like small great things. I love the cover but didnt want people confusing the two. Amazing art director came back with that and that caught my eye. Host speaking of small great things that is the next book we will talk about. What does that represent . Guest when i look at that cover i think of the color chips artists use and if you look at the covers there are spots where color is missing, where there is something not quite right about the color. There is an absence and small great things is about racism in america and metaphorically to me that is such a beautiful illustration of what i was trying to talk about. Host are you kennedy . Guest any person is kennedy. That book looks at a reallife incident that happened in flint, michigan. And African American nurse with 25 Years Experience in the labor delivery board helped deliver a baby and in the aftermath the babys father said he didnt want anyone who looks like her to touch his kids, pushed up his sleeve to reveal a swastika tattoo. This put him in a hospital and the babys files say no africanamerican is allowed to touch the baby. A bunch of personnel banded together and soon, hope she got a great payout but made me wonder what if that nurse was the only one alone with the baby when it went wrong and she wound up being brought up on charges of murder. What if she was defended by a white public defender, like me or my friends, doesnt consider herself a racist and if i could tell the story in her voice, the voice of the white supremacist dad and the voice of the white public defender as they unpack their feelings about race. To me small great thingss for white people. It is meant to say open your eyes a little wider. It is easy to point to a white supremacist and say that is a racist. It is harder for white people to point to themselves and say the same thing and yet race is about prejudice plus power and if you are white in america you hold all the power. It is easier for us to see the head winds of racism and to know if you are a person of color your life might be harder it is difficult for white people to acknowledge the tailwinds of racism and the fact there are unearned benefits that come to us because we are born like this. That is something that is on white people to learn and fix. Ultimately that is why i wrote the book. Host a quote from kennedy who became jeffersons lawyer, i wanted to live like this for an afternoon. One of the things i get asked a lot, people read the book and this rocked my world and i needed to do better. I live my life differently as a result of writing this book. One of the things i talk about is making yourself uneasy, putting yourself in a situation where this is not the predominant color in the room and most people havent had that experience and if they do it makes them feel a little on edge. That is okay. You are learning something if you feel that uneasy. One of many things you can do to be actively antiracist. Another thing to do is learn the difference between equal and equitable. People means the same, equitable means fair. If you have a student in your class who is blind would you give her the same test as everyone else . Of course not. He would give her a braille test with the same information. That is what i mean. Figure out because of systemic and institutional racism people are starting at different points, we have to make sure in whatever line of work we are in, everyone has a chance to get to the finish line, that is what equitable means, things like that, talking to people, who look like us and to say be aware of the fact you have privileges that others dont have. How will you take advantage of that privilege. If you are a mom goes your Childs School and say what are you teaching about africanamerican history . Just slavery but some inventors and awesome role models who happened to be black or better if you are white and asking that stuff, no matter where you are in your life you can find a way to be actively antiracist. Host to give some semblance of sympathy . Guest they are white supremacist. Its hard to find anything likable about white supremacist and turkey is the only character i have ever written where at the end of writing a section i would have to go downstairs and take a shower because i felt dirty. It felt too easy to slip into his patterns of speech and i hated myself for that. It made me so uncomfortable but it is rare that you find someone as a villain that is 100 evil. I dont think anyone is 100 good or 100 evil i do have thoughts about that in politics but we wont go into that right now. In my fiction people are balanced and multishades of gray and i needed you to feel sympathy for turk and ultimately he is a dad who lost his baby. Any parent would feel sympathy for that. Any parent could understand how hard that is whatever you think of him and his disgusting belief you understand he might be grieving the loss of a child and many people said it was hard for them to realize they felt sympathy for turk. There is another scene where he proposes, a romantic comedy moment and people said how dare he have a romance, people who are reprehensible in their beliefs dont fall in love, of course they do and that is critical to me, to recognize as a reader you will feel a tug and say i do have something in common with him but that is important because turkey turk has a seachange by the end of the novel and you should be able to believe, someone who is morally reprehensible can find a way out into the light. Host all of your books, nearly all have something at the end to keep us interested . Guest to keep me interested. A twist at the end, to be known for it, there is no twist, just to read it and i dont know. I like doing it because it provides me the ability to lay a paper trail. Anyone can throw a twist at the end of the book but it is a sucker punch unless you have threaded it through very carefully and i like doing that. I feel it makes me a better offer. Host turks character. Is he based on a real person . Guest turk is based on two former White Supremacists i met with as part of the research for this book. There was one man who grew up in orange county, california, in a pretty privileged family and ran with a violent gang of White Supremacists and one night he and his friends beat up a gay man and left him bleeding on the curb expecting him to die. Years later he got out of the movement and wound up working at the Simon Wiesenthal center, he wrote the rabbi an apology note and the rabbi wrote back and said come work for me and he did, started giving talks about living a life of hate. One day he was in the cafeteria and the guys coming through with the group he recognized, the man he had been up and left for dead in their eyes met and they spent months in conversation, there was understanding and forgiveness and they are now very good friends. The other man i spoke with, frankie minc, used to be the head of a white to premises group in philly. He was sent to jail and realized he had more in common with the black kids in jail open the white kids. They would talk about the food on the outside, the girls on the outside they missed. He got out of jail and began working for a jewish man and had all the worst misconceptions because he was a white supremacist. He thought here it comes, the guy will cheat me out of my money and instead the man said you did such an exemplary job i want to pay you double. How many exceptions do their have to be before the rules have to change . Many of the characteristics turk has came from that. Host liberal use of the in word, a decision you made early . Guest it had to be because it was turks voice because it is the way White Supremacists would talk and that made me need to shower. Host welcome to booktv on cspan2 on the monthly in depth program. Bestselling author jodi jodi picoult. If you would like to talk to our guests, house you do it, 2027488200, east and central time zone, 74882 one in the mountain and pacific time zone. Scroll through our social media site. Just remember booktv is the place to reach us on twitter, facebook and instagram. If you have a question or comment, if you are a reader of jodi picoult, youve written 26 books, every one of them a bestseller. I didnt have that overnight oprah moment, 3500 copies, songs of the humpback whale. What happened is people who read my books told their friends you should read this, it is after my sisters keeper how sister was my sisters keeper options for the movie . It was options it took a while. It was not a pleasant experience. It is it an effort to the book . You havent seen the movie . Dont. When that book was options, the only thing that was important was to keep the ending because it has a monstrous twist at the end and ultimately i know people read it so i can talk about it. That is how the producer who option the book had gotten it and they went to go higher and asked if i would talk to him and i said yes. It was important and he read the book and said not going to change the ending, if anyone does i will tell you myself, okay, i worked with him and he called me up and asked a question. I saw a script like that and got an email from a fan who was in the casting agency and they changed the ending of the movie and i called and he wouldnt take my call and went to the movie set and they threw me off the set. I went to the head of new lines and immensity will lose money because i have pretty eager and ardent fans who are not going to want to see this movie, we know what we are doing. Sure enough they lost money on the film. My fans were very upset. Ultimately the great irony is money speaks in hollywood. I said you will lose money and they did and as a result, i have had more Creative Control on future projects. Host do you have any Creative Control . Guest now. Fans dont realize this but most writers do not. If you have Creative Control that is the anomaly. Usually what hollywood will do is say you want Creative Control, we dont need that, we will go to another author who is willing to take the money and run but it is like giving a baby up for adoption. You try to make an educated choice and do the best you can but you are not allowed to call every day and say feed breakfast. Host small great things, how much Creative Control do we have . Guest i hope we have a little more. We will see. What we know is and when entertainment which is spielbergs Company Option that and they are attached. Guest when i read ruth jefferson. Guest an incredibly talented actress. Host before we get into the other books, before we get into the first call has your book on more topical . It is really funny. I tried to look at the trajectory of my career and it has sort of been where my brain is at any given time. If you look at the beginning, i was closer in age to the daughter than the mother. Then i had a baby, got married and had a baby right before my first book was published and my second book was about motherhood and how difficult it is, shocked me how hard it was and i got into marriage, relationships, 50 50 and had all my kids, a wide span of years that my books were about. All the terrifying things that happen from sexual abuse to kidnapping to suicide, all these things and they got to a point they were pretty selfsufficient and i began to take a step back and look at bigger issues that make me sit up and worry, things like the nature of good and evil, racism in small great things, what it means to lose someone, reproductive rights in a spark of light. Host in my sisters keeper you preface it with as the mother a child who has had ten surgeries. Host so my sisters keeper grew out of several things, it was about the eugenics project which very few people know about. In several states we modeled the program hitler used for his final solution and one of the things, one of the crazy throw away facts was the original American Eugenics Society was in new york and when they folded the group that took over was the human genome project and that seemed almost too close for comfort and i happened to read when i was researching the story of modern eugenics, the story of the nash family, the first to create a donor sibling to help their daughter molly who he was supposed to die by age 2, hanging on by a thread by age 3, they wound up designing a sibling for her who could provide a stem cell transplant through umbilical cord life and she went into remission and always great and that was a different topic and i started to think about that and thinking in particular, they were 5 and 8 and they were little kids, what happened to a donor sibling in teenage years, and i hear because of my sister . I wanted to explore that. I had been the parent of a child with multiple surgeries, it was a benign tumor that grows in your ear, if it hits your brain it will kill you. The traditional way is to scrape out the tumor and leave the child death in that year. We chose a different approach that might preserve a little hearing, turned out he had it in both years, less the 9 kids have it at the time and we made the right choice because at the end of this he had marginal hearing in his right ear and was definitely a year and went on to become a talented singer, tons of musical theater, like the best success story. I remember what it was like during those surgeries, how hard it was to keep the family balanced because one child had to take precedence. We like to say we love our children equally but the truth is circumstances arise that make you direct your attention to one of your children and what we really need is we hope we can be there for all our children when they need us most, that is how i wrote a deck of view for sarah in my sisters keeper. Guest we all have our scripts down pat, i am the lost cause or the peacemaker. A lot of familiar relationships. Guest i was watching my own kids break forge a family. I find my sisters keeper fascinating on many levels. It is hot in medical school for Nursing School and it really is something to consider because we tend to think parents make the best decisions medically but what if you have two children with competing medical interests . When it comes to medical ethics we know that a patient and what is happening to a patient convenes an Ethics Committee at hospital, donor is not considered a patient. They would not necessarily convene an Ethics Committee and it could be a weird slippery slope, choosing an embryo with 6 matching hla proteins is very different from choosing a child that has brown hair or a child that is female, and it was fun for me because it is one of these examples where science has almost outstripped morality and ethics and we get to the point where that happens. Host lets begin with ron in nicholasville, new york. Youre on with author jodi picoult. Caller wonderful hearing the you, thank you very much. You are such an impressive personality, you interview your self when being interviewed. If you were running for office if you were in my district i would vote for you. But i also want to say i am an unusual litter white male who has done Different Things that always grew up reading and still maintain that habit. I regretfully havent read many of your books. I stumbled into one or 2 along the way. I will seek out and try to correct that. I want to mention a couple people i have been reading, i got to reading imperfect verbs and Jeanette Wallace was recommended to me by my niece, there is a familial nongender book Club Obviously so we give books back and forth to each other and what then incredible, i read both of them and impressive stories. In the midst of the me too movement in the face of what is being faced is even more important for voices of reason and different points of view such as the characters you create. Host we are going to leave it there. Thanks for calling, jodi picoult, any reaction. Guest he picked up great female writers, excellent books, phenomenal writers. I am pleased he mentioned politics because i have been on the book tour for six straight weeks and every stop i was asked to run for office. If i had that happen on cspan, honestly, he pointed out something important which is he does have a nongender book club with his niece which is great and fantastic, not just the matter of reading women if you are a man. You should be broadening your bookshelf no matter who you are, one of the things i challenge people to do, how many authors of color are you reading . So many in catalogers of color and if you are not reading voices that are different from who you are you will never broaden your mind. That is the beauty of reading, how we expand our cells by hearing from people who are very different and lived life different from us. I applaud them for doing that. Host at your books, he beat us to the punch. Your file, the first person narrative will switch from you to roof to kennedy to alex. Is that a tough technique . Do you have to get in somebodys head, but now you are going to write about britt . Guest i love it. No idea why think of it this way but i imagine a bunch of rubber boots lined up on the side of a river and the narrative is the river and keeps flowing and when you are pooling a different first person voice used up into those boots and they will fit different from the next pair of boots and used up and the river and feel it flowing around you and pick up where you stepped into the river but the narrative will keep going no matter who is stepping forward. Some might have more room and some are soft and comfortable and others are stiff. That to me is what it is like to write in a different voice but one of the things i try to do when i write about a controversial subject is to provide everybodys point of view. A fiction writer i have an opinion that i dont mind sharing. Host on social media. Guest in my novel it is not my job to tell you what to think. I have an opinion, it should be no better or worse than yours. What i ask you to do is listen to every point of view regarding a controversial situation and decide why your opinion is what it is. You may never have listened to what the other side has to say and i will make sure in any book, i promise this to my readers you will hear everyone. Ultimately one of the beauties of a firstperson narrative is you are able to give multiple points of view easily. Everyone speaking at the reader is speaking with great conviction trying to get their point across. Host have you ever cried over a character that died . Guest i cry all the time. I hear from people who say they are devastated and you read a book in a week, im with these characters for 9 months, imagine how attached to them i get. They are very real to me. Host glenn in freeland, michigan on booktv with jodi picoult. Caller thanks, excellent, i was just reading a book on unit gen x from the early twentieth century, a project to create a white anglosaxon kind of population as opposed to all the other groups. Winston churchill was actually one of the proponents who tangled with as you might remember that bleeds into what i want to ask about the race issue. You made a statement i find it incredible that white people have all the power, we just had a black president relatively recently and he was the most powerful man in the world, Asian Americans have the highest education level, highest income in terms of raw numbers based on white People Living in poverty than any other group and i could go on and on and i remember the incident that inspired your book. The flint incidents. They made the decisions of the water crisis they have the power and the other major cities, dont you think this stuff isnt as simple as you make it out to be that power is situational and relative and it is sort of arrogant and condescending. Host we got your point. Lets hear from jodi picoult. Guest my take on that is often we hear we are in a postracial world, barack obama was president. There is this weird thing that happens with high levels of politics or media or stardom like oprah there is a transcendence where someone in the public eye, might be a person of color, almost loses that sense of color being what defines them because they wrap them as their own. The bottom line is to say is an americans have the highest educational level, not necessarily true. To say poverty exists, that is 100 true. There is poverty in the White Community and it is devastating but if you have a black homeless man in white homeless man on the street the white homeless man will get more donations and that is proven. The point isnt situational that we had one president or a media superstar was a black woman or my nextdoor neighbor is Asian American and was able to get into 10 ivy league colleges. Those feel situational. The overarching scheme of this country is one of systemic and institutional racism and a system like education, healthcare, even jobs and housing, still balanced in favor of white people and against people of color and there are many studies that have been done to support this, stuff you dont even, you as white people, me as a white person conditioned to believe it is hard work or luck if we get into a great college. We work hard in school and did well on our sats. All of that is very true but it is also true you probably had a parent who stayed home and read you nurse your rhymes and make you understand reading is something you do before you go to bed and didnt have parents who were working 2 or 3 jobs just to pay the rent. Education when you back it up like that you begin to see advantages white people have the people of color dont. There will always be exceptions to the rule but as a whole white people are still definitely the ones in power in america. Host you studied creative writing, masters in education from harvard, you utilized that directly. Guest i taught eighth grade english, concord math. I was living down there and loved teaching eighth grade. Two of my kids are teachers now, one teaches seventh and eighth grade math, one in massachusetts and i enjoyed being in front of the class, working with kids. In a team theater troupe in my hometown that i run for a decade and i love that age. I do believe in a way i am still a teacher. My classroom is really big. Host next call from jodi picoult in yonkers, new york. Caller after this call i would like to take a shower myself but dont want to delay your program. I love what you said. I am a white mail and men should read more female writers was all my favorite writers are female and i would like to mention one that happens to be black and female it is my favorite writer of the last 10 years, she wrote a book called the summer of don johnson and she is an amazing writer, you should check her out and i would like to say i love what you said about white people having to educate other white people and seems in an ever more uphill battle with we have in the white house and you have ultimate power for a day, what would you do to change things . I would like to suggest something myself. The only way to balance what happened in the past, 2 women in black people and American Indians have to vote for themselves for 300 years or so. That is the only fair way to do it. I would love to know i will get off the line and thanks so much and anxious to read your new book. Guest thank you. That is a lot, i get to change things in one day. Ive not heard of that author but i will check her out. I love finding authors i dont know yet. That is very exciting. If i could have control for one day i would ask anything i do not be overturned. Can i have that grace . I do believe two ways to overhaul systems, in particular systemic racism, we would have to i would overturn citizens united, i think that would bring politics back to the grassroots level. I would make sure Voter Suppression is wiped out so we get rid of gerrymandering, make sure there isnt redistricting in a way that feeds power to one particular party and the other thing i would do is have mandatory free advanced education. It wouldnt have to be a college education. You could get trade learning but i do believe people sit in their own echo chambers and are told what to think. Critical thinking usually happens at the collegiate level. That is where you learn to take a variety of opinions and balance them with your own beliefs and knowledge and move forward with that amalgamation of information, and that is what we need more of. Instead of being told what to think and told things we know are blatant lies in believing them we need people to draw their own conclusions and move forward. Host do you have any conservative friends . Guest most of my friends are not politically conservative. I have politically conservative friends, fiscally conservative friends which i admire but most of my friends are socially progressive and i would say morally progressive and it is because circumstances in my own life that would make it difficult to interact with someone opposed to gay marriage or Something Like that. Guest a spark of light, paul and aaron mcgarrah. Guest a prolife couple i spoke with and they were great. I got to them through a wonderful woman who lives across the street from me who i walk with miles in the morning this. Her daughter roomed with their daughter and said i know a lovely couple who would be willing to talk to you in two people who happen to be prolife and they were phenomenal. We had terrific conversations and it was really interesting to hear their point of view. I had a conversation with paul. I would definitely push as hard as i could and i would say are you what would happen if your daughter wound up 13 years old and pregnant, what would happen and he thought about it and thoughtfully said i hope she would talk to the two of us and to our priest and i hope she would make the right choice and i said thats an interesting word you use. It was great to have that kind of respect for conversation. One of the coolest things i got to do was be part of a podcast run by an evangelical from texas who is prolife with a large following in one of the things i talked about on my podcast was if you recognize that nobody wents to have an abortion, reducing the abortion rate would make everyone happy. How do we do that if we dont talk about roe versus wade in the easiest is dont get pregnant so contraception. In america, our teen birth rate is 13 per thousand. In canada 6000, sweden 7000. The only difference between our countries, and courses in schools. People who are most vocally prolife are anticontraception and that fascinates me, i dont agree with what you believe but if youre the voice of the unborn and are giving this baby a voice i understand where youre coming from. Contraception there is no baby so you are not talking about the unborn if you are anticontraception, youre just trying to control women sexuality. I have a big problem with that. I spoke about this in the podcast and a lot of regular clientele wrote me to say you have given me so much to figure out and one woman rose i am catholic and prolife and dont believe in contraception, i would love to talk to you about this because you should have some excited to you. We went back and forth, it was a terrific discussion. She sent me an excerpt from the vatican bio, which i dont read very often. A very accredited institution that is a lot of reproductive rights numbercrunching. And i have never seen a study like that so i looked at the study and i read the entire study and what i learned was the next two lines in the paragraph said this was because at the time the study was done families were making decisions to have fewer children and we saw numbers we didnt expect to see. After a few months we did see with the rise in contraception there was a decline in abortion rate so i sent her the study. She said i never would have imagined they would cherry pick and we had a great conversation that was completely respectful, we were not yelling at each other and we both allow the other to see things we wouldnt normally see. I asked if it bothered her to have three men who were celibate making decisions about her health care and i have never seen it like that. No priest ever made a decision about my healthcare. My husband and i decide together and i see natural Family Planning is my choice. If that is your choice i can get on board with that. Host where and how were you raised . Guest i was raised on long island, lived in one of the development the cropped up in the 60s in 70s, it was a selffulfilling prophecy. My dad works on wall street and my mom ran a Nursery School and i had a boring upbringing. My parents were phenomenal. I have a little brother and i like him. I didnt have any of the anguish i needed to be a writer and decided early on instead of writing what i knew which would have been very boring, i decided to learn what i was going to learn. Did you make your way to long island . Guest it was the first time i left long island and then worked on wall street for three months until the stock market crashed, moved to boston, worked as textbook editor, taught creative writing in a private school, got a masters in education, the second person in a 2person ad agency, got married, got pregnant, taught eighth grade english and kept writing after that. I was writing the whole time but found an agent during this period and when i left my teaching job the woman who was my agent and still is 30 years later, she wound up filling my book and it was published after words. Host the fifth call is another male. Guest i wonder where are the ladies . Come on. Guest host you are on with jodi picoult. Caller thank you for taking my call and thank you to booktv. I love it every weekend. I grew up in phoenix, arizona half a century ago when it was still agricultural. And exposure to the dairy industry. When i go to church, you are telling me how we are not supposed to have control over conception it is like talking to heard of cattle and i find it very disgusting. I wonder what you have to say about that and i will turn it to you and listen. Guest thanks. My basic feeling is if we had free and accessible contraception if it was available in schools along with sex and we would see differently a decline in the teen birth rate. And many of the women i spoke with who had terminated pregnancies were, thankfully, using Birth Control the right way, but theres still that 2 or that 4 . And, you know, that is a reason that i think we also need to i insure that there are reproductive choices for women. But obviously, if you are against abortion and you want less of them, a really good place to start would be making Birth Control widely accessible. Host i dont know if you can see the screen behind us, you can see i want to begin with debbie in california. Debbie, please go ahead with your with question or comment. Caller thank you for having me on, and thank you, booktv, for having my absolute favorite author on your show. And thank you, jodi picoult, for taking on controversial topics. And with every book i read of yours, peeling veils from in front of my eyes that i didnt even know existed. Id like to know how you came by such insightfulness, extremely jealous, and why so many of your novels end in courtroom dramas. And if you have time, would like to know if theres a topic you would not tackle. Host Great Questions. Guest really good questions. Host maybe we should get her to sit here. Guest oh, shes great. How i was raised, i think i was raised in a household where education was valued. And one of the things that i loved about my parents that i tried to model when i had children was they were never the kind of parents that you must get straight as, you know . Instead we wanted, my brother and i really wanted them to be proud of us, so we always tried our best. And as long as we were trying our best, they were happy for us. But they also, definitely education was valued in i our household. So i i think education can take many different forms, and i think you dont is have to be in school to get an education or to continue your education. One of the things i love about doing the research i do, which is extensive for my books, is i get to go back to school in a million different ways. And i think its that love of learning that makes me want to continue to be a writer because i am constantly finding out things i dont know, and thats, for me, some of the best part of the writing process. Second question was about host courtroom drama. Guest courtroom drama. Excellent question. So i am not a lawyer. I dont play one on tv. I did manage to give birth to the child who is now in his second year at law school are. [laughter] but i have learned things about the legal system that surprised me. Things that, like, for example, you can get a fair trial in america but only if you communicate a certain way. And if you dont, youre in trouble. And that was the genesis, for example, of house rules where a kid with aspergers syndrome whos very, very literal is not going to behave the way you would expect him to in a courtroom. Or, for example, plain truth which is about the amish e. Our system of justice in america is all about individuality and winning. You know, we want to be the best, be the brightest, expect expect and the amish are 180 degrees from the way americans think. For them it is much more important to be part of the group than the individual. And, in fact, they will go the great pains to not stand out in any way. So for that reason, lets say the bishop comes up to you and cities you have rubber wheels on your tractor, you have two weeks to get them off, and come in and speak to the congregation. You say, yes, of course. Because thats still better in admitting in any way or defending yourself as someone whos too passion naught about something. Passionate about something. Imagine that. Imagine you are a normal american attorney with an amish girl, shes going to say anything just to, you know, confess because thats how her culture has shaped her. Thats another thing that i wrote about. I remember thinking, you know, id never be called to testify against few husband in a court of law, but i would be called to testify against my own child. I wanted to create that situation. So often if i write something legal, its because ive learned something so crazy that i feel the need to tell all of you about it. Host what would you haut to tackle . Guest nothing. Host final question. Guest i havent found anything yet. I honestly thought it would be racism because i tried and failed to write a book about racism for 25 years. Host before guest yep. And it wasnt until i realized i wasnt writing a book to people of color. I have no right to do that as a white woman. I have not lived that life. If i were to write a book about a black persons experience, being black in america, i am a taking a spot on the shelf that a black author should have. I was writing a book, however, to white americans to say open your eyes. And, yes, i did have a character of color in there, but it involved me working very hard and very closely with about ten women of color who shared their lives, their hopes and fears and failures with me and allowed me to take their existence and braid it into the character of ruth and then became my sensitivity readers to make sure i got nothing wrong. Host next call comes from whitney in denver. Huh, whitney. Hi, whitney. Caller hi. Im a huge fan, and ive read every book youve written. Im begging you to come to denver, colorado, soon. Please. What book took the longest to write and what book was the hardest for you to write . Guest okay. What book took me the longest to write and what book was the hardest for me to write. You would have to say theyre probably the psalm, and its broadway the same, and its broadway [inaudible] and the reason it took me so long to write is every day id be up many any office up in my office typing, and something in the news would be a racially charged incident. And i literally could have kept that book open, from but at some point i had to stop and say, okay, this is my account cutoff now, and im going to finish the book and turn it in. I, it was also, it took a long time because of that, but also because i myself have so much to learn and so much work to do on myself as a person. I couldnt ask my readers to unpack their biases if i hadnt done it first. And i went into this project thinking im a nice person, you know . Im not prejudiced. And i learned a lot about myself. I learned that i, i hadnt talked about racism at the dinner table with my kids most of the time because i dont have to. A black family doesnt have that option. And i i went to Racial Justice workshops, and i left there in tears every night listening to the stories of people of color who, you know, were telling stories that were benign, you know, an asianamerican woman who saw eye liner as a standard of beauty because its on american white models but had trouble putting it on her own face, and she was sobbing as she told the story. Or the africanamerican woman who said every time she walks out the door she has to put on a mask so she can be the kind of black woman that other people can handle. And that sense you are constantly walking on a tight rope. That was stuff i really didnt realize until i began to hear all these stories and hear them viscerally. It completely changed who i am, how i see the world and how i live my life. So that book really meant the most to me. Host make sure we got all the questions. Which one was this is, i guess, im going to build on her question which was the most emotionally wrenching . Guest god, theyre all emotionally wrenching host you mentioned that you cry a lot as youre writing your books and research. Guest yeah. It was hard because i was visiting parents with children who were dying, you know . Thats where i did my research. And i went to memorial sloankettering, and i watched the kids there having their prom where they deniesed with danced with iv poles between them. And theres so much that is so heartbreaking. I remember sitting in these rooms and having these kids who were completely engaged there in the moment and talking to me expect parents who were they had almost a [inaudible] on their face, and the minute they walked outside of where their child could see them, they broke down. A woman who had a child with cancer who had steven another scan seen another scan of her childs chest and fell to her knees because she said the tumors come back, and the doctor said, no, maam, thats your daughters heart. Host piper, atlanta. Good afternoon. Caller good to get through. Hi, jodi. Guest hi, piper. Caller i met with you when you came down to spelman to do research guest yes caller but if you recall what happened when you came down guest oh, i do. [laughter] caller one of our infamous rare snowstorms, and you got through the campus but i did not. [laughter] [inaudible] that was awesome. My question has to do with the publishing piece. Im really glad to hear you speaking about these spaces where black people have not been [inaudible] the Publishing Industry is also one of the places where black people, black women have had a hard time breaking through on the traditional level are. So my question is i wonder since small, great things, what have you been doing to use your power as a best selling white author to rectify this [inaudible] and my other question is who would you consider your [inaudible] among black women writers . And ill hang up and host piper, just a second, with we dont want to lose you. Who would you consider your caller your comp. Host your comp . Caller comparable author. Host comparable. Hey, piper, we cant leapt you go without tell us a little bit about yourself. If you were scheduled to meet with jodi picoult. Spelman in atlanta, how is it that you got to be part of this group . Caller well, im a professor there in the english department, and they wanted some of us to come in, and it was a lunch they were having or Something Like that, and she was going to talk [inaudible] at the time. So i was on it because i am a fan and a reader of your books. So lots of women of color read jodi by e caughts books, and Jodi Picoults books, and im one of them. Until that snowstorm [laughter] host so, piper, thank you. Was that one of those snowstorms that we here in the north guest oh, you have no idea. Host roll our eyes . Guest i still have ptsd. It was half an inch of snow no, no, no, you dont understand. My husband was traveling with me, and we actually had a car. We pulled out of the airport. We were going, i think, 4 miles and in the fourth hour of being stuck on the highway, people just literally walked out of their cars. They took they leave them. They just leave their cars on the highway in atlanta and they leave. We actually wound up reversing, we were in a car with fourwheel drive, went the wrong way up an exit ramp. We started going down the back streets where there were accidents everywhere. It was crazy e in atlanta. And so the next day we were like, yeah, were up, were going to get down to Spelman College and, actually, im so sorry i didnt get to meet with piper because Beverly Daniel tatum, who was the president at the time, she wound up pulling some kids who were on the campus to her home. And so i did get to go and meet at least with a few, a few students, which was great, including one who has become a very good friended and also a terrific writer herself, a wonderful africanamerican young woman writer doing some great stuff. So, yes, actually, piper, im still having ptsd from that. [laughter] but, yeah. The question was what am i doing now. One of the things that i do all the time when i give a talk is, first of all, i absolutely address the white people in the audience, and i destruct them not only on what not to do when were talking about racism because white people do make a lot of mistakes, but also what they can do which is some of the stuff i was talking about before, the idea of calling out your racist uncle at thanksgiving when he makes a racist joke instead of just pretending you didnt hear it. And, you know, educating yourself because knotts up to black people to can its not up to black people to educate white people. All lyes cant matter lives cant matter until black lives matter more. Dont say i have black friends. And the thing i always challenge audiences to do is to, or again, look at that book shelf and ask yourself, are you reading authors of color . And when they dont know who to read, i have a long list oaf people who i list of people who i can easily recommend. Colson whitehead, nick stone, angie thomas, to broaden it to writers of different colors, celeste king and Christina Enriquez and, you know, i can go on and on and on. I will decline, however, as trying to puck my comp because, i mean, im telling you, when i read a book like the mothers by Brooke Bennett who was this amazing africanamerican female author who blew me away with her book last year, shes younger than i am, and i wouldnt even begin to say, oh, your first book was as good as that one. I would never do that. I would be worried to put myself in competition with white colors versus authors of color. Im really grateful that there are so many authors of color who i get to read. I remember Coulson Whitehead had been on social media talking about the fact that he had a new book coming out, and boom, i ordered out the minute he announced that. Again i say all the time and i maintain if you look at your book shelf and you are not reading authors of color, you are not only missing out on some incredible stories, but you are not broadening your mind. Host now, i have to do a quick commercial for booktv and, of course, i lost my paper. Youve mentioned several people who have appeared on boog tv. Guest o, good. Booktv. Oh, good. Host jasmine ward. Beverly taw tunnel. Theyve all a appeared on booktv. You can type their name in in the search function at the top of the page, and youll be able to watch their presentations online. As we continue our conversation with jodi picoult, are we saying your last name correctly . Guest you are, yes. Host several different pronunciations, and i just wanted to make sure. Lafayette, indiana. Hi, kathy. Caller hi. Thanks for taking my call. Jodi, im a big fan, and im also excited to are you there . Host we are listening, kathy. Just go ahead. Dont look at your tv, just listen through your telephone, okay . And were listening to you. Caller okay. Im [inaudible] teacher, and the one thing that if i had a suggestion of a book is i had an experience where i was a caseworker, one of my young men that i was an advocate for later became a serial killer. Finish and so i wondered, i dont know all your books, but i was wondering do you have any books around that or would you be interested in that story at all . Guest so thank you for that, that question. I do actually can i just jump back, theres something we didnt answer about piper that i do want to say that i think is important. She asked about the Publishing Industry and bias against writers of color, and i did want to say she is absolutely right, and one of the problems is that the gatekeepers in the Publishing Industry are not agents of color, or were seeing some more editor it is of color, but we really need to continue to grow that. What i think even more important though, since i wrote small, great things certainly in the ya industry we have seen explosion lets say, motion with quotes around out9 of writers of color that are being successful. You have the hate you give which is on the ya list for 50 weeks, such an amazing book. But we need to see that at the adult level, first of all, more of it. And the other thing is is we need to see it in a way that is not just like the africanamerican arm of a publishing company. You know, i think that the disservice that we do to writers of color is assuming that only people of color should be reading authors of color. This sounds a little bit like that woman thing, doesnt it, you know in when in reality, white people should absolutely be reading about the experiences of black people in america and vice versa. So i hope not only do we have more gatekeepers of color, but we start to see integration in the fact that its a good story, and thats what makes it something that should be publishable. But now on to kathy. So i dont think i have written about a serial killer. I dont know that it would be the story that you would puck up necessarily. I dont know that it would be something that i would dive into. I never say never, but i always do get a lot of mail and contact from people that say i have a story that i really need you to write. And especially because you were intimately involved in the, you know, the case work of this young man, hearing that from your point of view is going to be much more resonant than if i were to create a piece of fiction. So i always do encourage people even if you dont see yourself as a writer, sit down and try to write something about it and see what happens. You can always end up hiring a ghost writer to try to cobble it into some form. Host where does the term 19 minutes come from . Guest 19 minutes is a book that i wrote about bullying and school shootings, and 19 minutes is how long it takes peter in this book to go through his school and systematically cull about 20 people kill about 20 people. Host do you identify more and, again, im putting you in these books, and thats completely not fair [laughter] more with alex or lacey . Guest i think i would probably identify more with alex who is the mom of jost josie. As they got older and peter got to be more awkward and josie became more popular, their lives diverged. And list su e is peters mom. The only reason i would say im more like alex is because of one thing the that i remember writing with about alec, and i had alex, and i add done research with a judge because alex is a judge. This judge was telling me, it was a female judge, that when she went to the Grocery Store on sundays, like she had to make sure she wasnt wearing her sweat pants with holes in them, and, you know, she wasnt a mess, and she couldnt dell yell at her kids because, you know, people see you as that judge, and you always have to be that judge. Now that said, i have seen plenty of times in my home town wearing my sweat pants with holes in them and being pretty down to earth. This is more makeup than ive had on my face in six weeks. On the other hand, that public per see that is something i do identify with alex on. Host and you write that in the book. Guest i do. Host is senator Jeanne Shaheen a friend of yours . Because she has a cameo in this book. Guest i didnt know her e when i wrote that book at all, actually. I didnt know her in the least. And then actually, we met together at a fundraiser in New Hampshire that was raising money for women who were homeless and were having job interviews. It was raising money to gather money so that they could have interview suits. And she interviewed me on the stage, and that was like a million years ago. I cant even remember how long ago it was. And then my son actually wound up interning for her at one point when he was in college. Our paths have crossed multiple times. I really respected her as a governor and as a senator, now our senior senator from New Hampshire. I am equally well acquainted with the junior senator, maggie hassan, who i had the privilege of having as an interviewer when i was in d. C. Host how much anonymity do you have as an author . Guest oh, i have none. [laughter] i mean, you know, i live in a small town, and everyone kind of knows everyone anyway. So if you are, if youre known, oh, thats the author. Ill hear that a lot, that kind of thing. If i ever really want people the not know who i am, all i have to do is pull my hair back. Host lets take another call, barry in center harbor, New Hampshire. Do you know where that is . Guest hey, i do know where that is. Beautiful there. Host this is barry. Caller hi. Jodi, i was fascinated. I love booktv, i watch it on opportunities on the weekend, but i was going to do some errands until you mentioned medical ethics. So i thought i would bring up a subject you may not have written about, i hope that you will look into it. Its a routine neonatal circumcision. This is a couple of books occupant, one is called the elephant in the hospital, its about 33 minutes. A more recent one is called american circumcision, and today as we speak theres a group called the bloodstained men which are very active on facebook demonstrating in front of the american i academy of pediatrics convention in orlando, florida. Those who were involved in the movement consider it a violation of human rights and there are a lot of older men im one, but there are many others who have felt damaged their entire lives. Its a very difficult subject to get through to the doctors with. Were the only country in the modern world that withdrew teen i routinely circumcises infants for nonreligious reasons. Host so, barry, this is an issue that youd like to see jodi picoult look into as an author . Guest i think if she yeah. I think that she would be well suiting to look into it because she host jodi picoult, in your book small, great things, there is guest there is a sir circumcision scene, yeah, as a matter of fact. Its one of the things that sort of gets the plot rolling, as a matter of fact. Because it flags something that happens during and after it flags, its a sign of a bigger illness in this child, a genetic illness. You know, again, its really interesting. As authors, i wonder if the other authors get as many people saying oh, you should write about this. I get them the all the time. People write to me constantly with ideas. And there have been times id be like, hmm, thatd be an interesting idea. I do find for me what makes a good idea is something that intersects with my life at a certain point where i am worried about something, thinking about something, obsessing about something, something thats almost keeping me up at night. You know, i cant say this is something id necessarily given a lot of thought to. Perhaps in the future it will be more prevalent in my thought process, but there are other things right now that are keeping me up at night. Host i think i read a quote by you saying once i finish a book, i start the next day on another one. Guest yeah, yeah. Im actually at the end of a six week book tour for a spark of light, and literally the day after i finished the last event, i am headed to yale to work with an egypttologist who has been helping me do research for my next book. We are going to to be looking aa middle kingdom coffin that has the book of two ways which is one of the [inaudible] texts from the coffin text in the king. Com of egypt on the bottom of it, and she is going to show me how she would go about translating that, and im literally doing that on my way home from this book tour. Host okay. Ing help us with the theme of the book. [laughter] guest is so its actually the book that i will be working on next, and it, unlike my more recent books, it hasnt been its not, i would say, a big controversial issue. Its more for me an interior emotional book the way i would say leaving time is an interior emotional book. And it asks the question who would you be if you werent who you are right now. What if your life add had taken one tiny fork in a different direction. And it also has to do with ancient egypt. And the reason it has to do with ancient egypt is because many people are have heard of the book of the dead, right . It grew out of prior texts like the pyramid texts from way, way back and the coffin text from the muddle kingdom of middle kingdom. And someone of them is the called the book of two cay ways. The book of two ways. Its a very beautiful, artistic representation of something that almost looks like a video game, and it is the first visual interpretation we have of an a after life. And it posits that you can go one of two ways, you can go by air im sorry, by sea or by land. And no matter which way you go, you will wind up at the same place in the after life. So that metaphorically is tying into what im writing about. Host so youre going to meet with a yale professor, the egypttologist guest yes. Host some of the things you have done in research include are watching sly stallone on a movie e set, observed cardiac surgery, gone to jail for the day [laughter] milked cows on an amish farm, learned wick can love spells, explored bone marrow transplants, gone ghost hunting, spent more time in a jail in a hard core guest death row. Dont forget death row. Host im working my way down. [laughter] early on in your career was it a little more tough to get into these places . Guest yeah. Host your name opens doors, doesnt it . Guest you know, its not really that. Honestly, i have not, i have not changed the way i approach research in, like, the 25 years that aye been writing. I write the same let rear, the only difference is now its an email. Hi, my names jodi, im a novelist, im writing about x, i hear youre an expert if, i would love to shadow you, talk to you, and then i say ill be calling you in the hopes that we can find a mutually convenient time. And im a very good pest, and i keep going until someone picks up the phone. In all the years that i have been doing this, only once have i really had a problem connecting, and it was for keeping faith. And everybody else really likes to be an expert for a day. Thats what ive discovered. You know, as long as youre willing to work on their schedule. Host okay. The story of being kicked off the movie set for my fors keeper. Were you going in pretty hot . Were you pretty angry at the time or did they just not guest i dont think they wanted me around. I did get permission to go back, but it was hike mommy and daddy were fighting [laughter] host heidi from pararah dice valley paradise valley, arizona. Youre on with best selling author or jodi but caught. Caller and its truly a pleasure, jodi. You have been a tremendous influence and inspiration many, many years, over the many, many years ive read your book. In fact ive read at least ten books, and whats funnily enough, we have a similar history as far as growing up on long island. But i have had several experiences living my life in l. A. For many years and really having quite a trauma occur in my, you know, kind of, in the last ten year of my life. So, but ive been a writer but never at the level that i would love to be. And i know ive got what i know i have, you know, some wonderful opportunity or the opportunity to do it, but, or you know, my i always think to myselfs with you with as an example, you know, your processes. So thats my question is about, gee, what is your, really truthfully, not just kind of a quick little, you know, oneline answer, but what exactly how do you keep balance in your life . How have you done this . Is it because you were very well educated at princeton . I am as well, but the idea that you came in, youre very disciplined it sounding like from the gunning, from the beginning, and how are you, you know, how do you keep your balance in your life having the ability to do so many things and yet focus. And then time wise, literally, like, do you are you up in at four in the morning, you know, when are your writing hours . How many hours do you write a day . Do you feel satisfaction . Guest uhhuh. Host heidi, thanks for watching, thanks for calling in. Guest i will say, first of all, you know, it is not easy to be published. If it was, everybody would be published. And, of course, things have changed since i started out because now, you anyone can go and publish something online digitally if thaw want to. I think i personally e do not endorse selfpublishing for a lot of reasons. I think its important to have the heft of a brick and mortar publisher behind you that can market your book. But that said, in america that usually means you need an agent because most big publishing houses do not read unsolicited man manuscripts. I had over 100 renexts from publy rejections from publicists. Finally a woman said im going to open my own firm, and i think i can represent you. Shes still my agent 30 years later. I think publishing is set up to weed out those who dont have faith in themselveses. Youve got to stick to it, and it can take years. But if you keep thinking you have something to offer and you keep submitting it, eventually someone will take a second look, and that may be all you need. So, you know, stick with out. Thats my first bit of advice. I do not think you have to be well educated to become a writer. I dont think you need an msa. I think what you do need is a workshop course because you need to learn how to give yourself criticism and how to be your best critic and to write on demand. Those are the two most important tools a writer can have this their toolbox. Once you know that, you dont have to keep taking workshop courses anymore. For me, the way i am incredibly organized, no question about it, and the way i structure my day now differs whether its a promotion day, research day or writing day. If its a writing day, i usually get up in the morning, i have i exercise, ill go for a run or a long walk with friends, come back, my husband makes me the best cup of coffee on the planet, i go back upstairs to my office, i answer fan mail for about an hour x then i pull up whatever it is i was writing that day, and i usually stop around 4 00 and go back downstairs and continue on with my other life. And i am really disciplined. I used to write in 15 minute snips every time my kids were watching tv or were at Nursery School or were napping, and yoused to bring my computer to practice and just writer anywhere i could because i didnt have a lot of time when my kids were little. And i learned you can always edit a bad page, but you cant edit a blank page x. Even after my kids went to school for eight hours a day and now that theyre adults and out of the house, i still function the same way. I sit down and write something, something that i can always fix later. Host so is two pages [inaudible] ill tell you why because i can have a great day writing a threepage scene that takes eight hours or i can have a great day writing 50 easy pages of a trial. It fends on what im writing. It depends on what im writing. I dont even check my word count, i dont know. Host does dialogue come easy to you, or is it one of the tougher areas . Guest its easy. I like dialogue because i hear it. Its very hard for me to explain how to create characters. Probably the hardest thing i can do because i feel as though theyre speaking to me. Im watching the movie none of you can see. Ive always said writing is successful schizophrenia because i get paid to hear voices in my head, and thats what it is. Research helps me know what theyre saying, but their mannerisms, their speech patterns, whats upsetting them, what they need to talk about, that just arrives in my head fully formed. Host spent time with the d. Of Justice Division that tracks down nazi war criminals, spent time in botswana with elephant researchers, spent time with chip coffee, a psychic. What is your reaction to this review written by [inaudible] in the New York Times guest okay. I know which ones it is. Host we rarely encounter bad parents. Instead we meet mothers and fathers who try and fail to meet the current standards of caring for children, people who affect the deep e concern, who have absorbed the therapeutic language of talk shows and womens magazines but who are congenitally unable to implement the idiom. Parental inadequacy and elaborate misfortune repeatedly econ spire in her book to produce all together new horrors. What does that mean . Guest i think what it means is one of the beauties of writing with fiction as i see it is taking ordinary people and placing them in extraordinary circumstances and seeing what happens in that crucible. And i like doing that. I remember that review very much was i remember it kind of casting my books as, like, bad parenting fiction. It was a very strange label. And, you know, im sure you could do a deep dive and see certain books of mine that fit that characteristic you can, but there are many more that dont as well. Host speaking of which, handle with care came out in 2009. Is Charlotte Okeefe likable . [laughter] guest yeah, she is. Host i dont guest i know host i didnt like her. Guest its okay. So handle with care, its the story of wrongful burt. Birth. Basically, that is a legal tactic that was pretty much invented in the united states, and its when a parent has a child with a profound disabilitying and goes to court and testifies and says if my ob gyn had told me few child was going to have to this round disability, i would profound disability, i would have terminated the pregnancy. So hes the interesting thing that i heres the interesting thing that i learned when writing this, the parents who go to court and say these things love these kids so much, so, so much. But because of our health care system, they do not have the funds necessary to make sure their child is going to live the best life possible. And so they go to court because its a way to get money so that they can continue to take care of their kid in a way that is going to give them a terrific life. Which is really a terrible statement on the state of health care in america, you know, in and of itself, that we have to invent a kind of lawsuit like this to create that kind of nest egg that you need for a child with a disability. I read an article about that, and i was fascinated by the concept of a parent getting up and saying that in court. Now most of the time when that happens, the child theyre talking about has such profound disabilities that they may not even understand what a parent is saying. But i thought how interesting would it be if you got up to say that in court and your child might have had a physical disability, but mentally 100 there. So i found myself looking at osteogenesis imperfecta which is basically butting bone syndrome brittle bone syndrome. And there are many different entypes and variations of this condition you can have. Type iii is the most severe that also is compatible with life, and kids who have oi type iii have dwarfism, theyre usually about 3 feet tall, they need multiple surgeries, theyll break hundreds of bones in a lifetime, thaw wind up with respiratory issues. Its a really, really tough physical existence, but mentally theyre often smarter than their peers. Great kids. And i thought how interesting would it be to create a situation where a mom got up in court and said that about her child, and the child could hear. And what if the moms ob gyn was also her best friend. So charlotte does the talking in court and, yes, i can see why she might be offputting to you. I think she loves willow, her daughter, to excess. And, honestly, this is the only way she feels she can take care of her in a way that will keep her safe and sound even past charlottes own lifetime. I do not believe he goes about it the right way, and i do believe that charlotte learns the ultimate lesson in this book, without giving anything away. Host and im just looking back at my notes from handle with care to tie into our friend from atlanta, her best friends name guest piper i know. I thought of that when he called. [laughter] host i had forgotten. Who is samantha van [inaudible] guest well, my daughter, as a matter of fact. So he is my youngest she is my youngest, and id had the great privilege of writing two young adult novels with her. When sammy was 13, she called me. I was on book tour somewhere in california, and she said, mom, i think i have a really good idea for a book. I said, all right, lets hear it. She said what if every time a book was closed, the characters had lives and personalities, and what if there was a prince in a fairy tale who was so sick of it, and nobody ever saw him as anything but that, until there was a 15yearold girl who was obsessed with childrens illustrated fatherly tale books because the prince was really attractive. And what if one day he actually spoke to her . And wanted out of his story as much as she wanted out of hers in and i thought she was brilliant. I already thought she was brilliant, but i knew it at that moment because who hasnt had a literary crush in im still waiting for mr. Daughter is city to show darcy to show up. I thought it was a terrific presence, and i said lets work on this together. We literally sat next to each other eight hours a day in my office, we took turns typing, we talked every single word of that book out loud. I would say a sentence, she would say a sentence. We finished the book when she was 16, we did a three con innocent book tour. Continent book tour. And she swore she was never going to write a sequel even though we set it up. And sure enough she went to vassar, and her freshman year she called me and said ive been thinking about a sequel. We went on tour for that book as well, and we have had the great pleasure of working to turn that into a musical which is supposed to be a off broadway this summer being produced by daryl roth who did kinky boots and who has won many, many tonys and has been directed by jeff calhoun. And we have an amazing song writing team and a book writer named tim mcdonald. We have had such a great time working as a family with them to turn this into a musical. Host well, we want to show you a little butt of jodi picoult and her daughter samantha talking about working [laughter] on their ya book. Our live conversation with jodi but caught will continue after this. I hi, im jodi but caught [laughter] no u youre not. You just snorted. All i dud was say my name. Take two. We are the authors of off the page. Off the page is the companion piece [inaudible] which is the story that we began writing about prince oliver trapped in a fatherly tale and lila, the read or on the outside who manages to get him outside. What happens when you get your wish, when with out comes true . Can you still create happily ever after, and more importantly, how you do it. I think i learned in the process that my mother is incredibly weird. [laughter] there was actually a moment when i was seriously considering pitching sammy out the window. And vice versa. You were horrible too. I had your desk [inaudible] [laughter] we did butt heads a lot, but i think we were producing our best work at the moment which was really kind of cool. Off the page blossomed, and because of that there are characters that are new in this book and thatt are, i guess, richer to this book as well. In off the page you really zoom out, and you get to hear the stories of people like edgar and jasmine who were kind of just sideline characters are now suddenly in the forefront. And i think that actually produced a much better book. It came out funnier, tighter and theres twists on every freaking thing. Its just insane. Its very educating, i think. It came out beautifully. Host and we are back live of with jodi picoult. Weve got about an hour left in our program with her. This is our special fiction edition of in depth. Were in month 11. Spark of life premiered number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Were going to put the phone numbers up. In case you cant get through, i think theyre a little bit jammed, we do have some social media sites, and you can make a comment or ask a question that way. 2027488200 in the easts or central time zones, 8201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones x. If you want to make a comment via facebook, twitter or instagram, just remember booktv. That is our handle. Trivia question for you, joad jodi picoult. How many women have written wonder woman . Guest i cant tell you how many since me, but when i started writing the series, i was only the second woman since 1941. Host why . Guest well, thats a really good question to put to them, isnt it . You know, i dont know why it took that long to get a female writer. I will tell you that i do think it made a difference. I think wonder woman, whos been around since 1941, is the remarkable character. He is, you know, as strong as superman, shes 6 feet tall, she is intelligent and charismatic and fly and has her lasso e of truth. God knows we could use that these days. Theres so many wonderful things about her. But shes always, she was also, i think its really important to say, she was huge when she debut because prior to her aarrival in 1941 the only women characters were either secretaries or betty and veronica fighting over a guy. So she was a whole new role model. And yet shes always kind of struggled to find an audience in a way. And she, many of the male storylines that were written about her were great but also involved in some way damaging her or hurting her or binding her, trapping her. And, or you know, why would you give a woman all that power and then try to take it away from her . Is and i think its because theres this weirdness, this belief that a woman should be strong but not too strong. If shes too strong, shes intimidating to men, and shes not relatable to women. Is so you have to walk that really fine line. Sounds a little like politics, doesnt it . And when i went to write her, i didnt want her vulnerability to come from something physical, which is the way it had been handled in the past by men. And instead i thought about her origins, the fact that she, unlike superman, doesnt have, you know, like a u. S. Kind of human family, right . She comes shes an amazon, and so she loves humans, but she isnt one of them. So theres already this disconnect there. And the oh thing i thought about was that this is a woman who is in disguise, is working, is trying to maintain that disguise, also cares about balancing herself, her work, her family, her friendships. Who does that sound like . Sounds like a lot of women, right . And that was the way to make her relatable, by making her emotionally vulnerable. So that was what i tried to write into my series. She had some mommy issues [laughter] and i loved writing it. It was a totally, absolutely unique to me. I was approached by dc or comics after i had written the tenth circle which had a comic book embedded in it. I didnt have time to write it, and i went downstairs to do it is and said i was just asked to write wonder woman, and i cant do it. My kids looked at me and said, mom, you have to do that. It was a lot of fun to collaborate, to work and help create the visual image of the story that we were creating. It was, you know, it was an experience unlike anything else ive ever done. Host stretched new muscles for you . Guest yeah, it really did. I really love doing that. I really love writing in contexts that arent novel writing, you know . That was kind of my first foray, id say writing a comic book, that was a little different. When i got to write with ya novels with few daughter, that was a little different. Ive had the great honor with working with this cast, this Creative Team on turning between the lines into a musical. So much so that i like doing it and decided i wanted to continue, and we are in the process of turning the book piece into a musical which isnt even my book. [laughter] host well, who did the illustrations in wonder woman for you . Guest oh, gosh a lot of people . Guest actually its different artists who work on different issues. So that book was taken from five different issues that were put together and called love and murder. My favorite illustration though comes in the fifth story where the amazons come to kind of invade america, and theres someone who i directed who looks a lot like me no, no, no. Shes a red held can and shes got curls, and shes kicking batmans butt. [laughter] host all right. Lets go back to our callers, if lets hear from kathy in santa barbara, california. Kathy, thanks for holding. Youre on with author jodi picoult. Caller hi, jodi. I have a question about your finding that some prolife protesters themselves had abortions. A lot of doctors had a abortions secretly and took Cash Payments and a lot of them were conservatives. This was before the internet. So do you think this would happen again if roe was reversed Given Technology today . Highlight and find out that republicanvoting doctors are doing abortions for money . Guest i dont know if that would happen. I do believe that if roe overturned and it goes to the state level, theres certain things we will immediately see. The eight states that currently have one single surviving Abortion Clinic will lose those immediately. Many states in the bible belt and the south will follow suit. And honestly, reproductive rights will become something thats at the mercy of your zip code if youre a woman. Rich women will be able to travel across state lines, which i think is completely unfair. I dont know who the Abortion Providers will become in the deep south. I dont know if they will be conservatives. I honestly cant answer that question. What i can tell you with authority is that abortions will continue to happen illegally, or and i imagine that, yes, they probably still will be unsafe because theyre going to be done in secret and in places where Womens Health care not a priority. Host where did the bookkeeping faith come from . Guest the bookkeeping faith came from a conversation i was having with my oldest son when he was a 5 years old. He was riding his bicycle up and down our little driveway in circles, and he comes around the circle and he goes, whos god . You know, like a little, tiny question for me to answer. Im not religious, you know, i wouldnt define myself as agnostic or atheist, and i said, well, some people believe that god is someone who is up above us watching over everyone to keep them safe. And he does another loop x he goes like a babysitter. And i said, yeah, thats kind of what hes like. Another loop and he said, all of my babysitters are girls. And i thought, huh. [laughter] you know, what if there was a little girl who suddenly said she was seeing god and saw her as a female . And i decided that i was going the write that book. Host did you hear a book in your head right at that point . Guest yes. Yeah. And, you know, i remember my impetus for keeping faith was to offend all religions equally [laughter] because i knew i was going to be chipping away at a lot of dogma. I interviewed priests, i interviewed evangelical pastors, people who did, like, tent revivals, i interviewed i remember interviewing this priest in the town very close to mine and saying why is it that catholics are the only one that ever see the virgin mary in toast . He was like, i dont know, thats a really good question. He was great. Everyone i spoke to was great until i had to find a rabbi, and i went to the interfaith chaplain at dartmouth which is the university closest to where i live, and it was a rabbi. Very nice guy, but i walked in and before i could even say a word about my plot, he said if you write this book, youre going to perpetuate mistruths that have dogged judaism for 5,000 years. And i was like, well, i havent even said anything yet about what i was writing about. Basically, he didnt want the talk, although he said that he would, and he i found out about three days later that he was leaving the university, like there was just some thing going on in his life. But regardless, i still needed a rabbi. So i found a woman who was a catholic, cop accelerated to judaism con vempted and also was a lesbian. And i thought, okay, shes got to be open minded. And she was wonderful. One of the facts she came up with by looking through the torah for me was one of the words for god in hebrew means like the hill god or the mountain god. But the word means breast. So Little Things like that i was able to use in the book. I went back to her for other books as well when i needed help for something based in judaism. Host so after the book was published, what dud your team of what did your team of priests and rabbis and evangelicals, what did they say . Guest they were very happy with it. Everyone got a copy of it, they seemed to feel it was dealt with honestly and openly. It really was about the nature of belief. Theres a character, ian fletcher, he is the opposite of a televangelist. Hes a television atheist. And he winds up on the front lawn of this woman mariahs house. Her daughter faith is the one who is, quote, seeing god, and things happen that he cant explain. And so he is questioning husband own beliefs too. And, you know his own beliefs too. And ultimately that was why i wanted to write this. Sometimes religion has gone from hole lu to holier than thou. We certainly see out in the meld of politics and religion. It is amazing to me what 2018 looks like when our Founding Fathers created this country really to be separate. They meant for religion and politics to stay very sharply divided. And i dont understand how they have gotten into bed with each other so fiercely except for those Campaign Finance reform laws that im going to change. [laughter] and, you know, so i really wanted to sort of attack that. Its something that took more than one book, as a matter of fact. When i wrote change of heart, one of the things that i came back to in change of heart was rebigs again. Thats a was religion again. Thats also about the Death Penalty e in america, but its about a man who is on death row and decides that to redeem himself before he dies, he needs to donate his heart to the sister of his victim who needs a heart transplant. It was not chosen to be part of christianity. So when you read these books, youre pretty deep into theology. I have to be, yeah, yes. But, i mean, you spent a lot of time researching. Yes, i do. Are there certified cases of stig mata happening or people quoting the bible who have not been exposed to it . Yes, i remember with stigmata, i remember speaking to e. R. Physicians, if someone had stigmata, what would you see, injury to the hand. Theyd see injuries to muscles, tissues and bones. So we had to create that in reverse, but there has been examples of, you know, people who have apparently bled from the places that christ had his wounds and thats considered to be stigmata. Did your views ever get challenged writing these books . I would say in any topic. And that book taught me the most. What i will say is that i think ive become a more confirmed, nonreligious person because of the research ive done and in particular with change of heart, learning about the gospels, doing a oneonone tutorial with elaine pagels. The history is so fascinating. When you live in the vax sum and youre told this is the word of god, you miss that history hyped behind it. In the years after christs death, it was a hot mess. And those that believed in nostics, you couldnt have a priest tell you what it was, you had to find it yourself. It was different for everyone and the only way to do it was to ask a million questions, that was very threatening to other people who called themselves christians, and one already said, all right, weve got to do something here and he basically said matthew mark and john, those gospels all look alike and well pick one more im sorry, matthew mark and luke are the ones that look alone and the gospel of john, he knew the guy who knew the guy who wrote it and for that reason he picked that as the four gospel. He said these are the four pillars of christianity. If you dont believe it, youre not a christian. Christianity was an editorial decision. What if the gospel of thomas was included. And what if you heard jesus said if you do not bring forth whats in you, whats within you will destroy you. What if, whats within you will help you. Mary magdalene got jettisoned, it doesnt have anything to do with salvation, he was teaching stuff that p people off, and i think its important when you write a book like sing you home, about gay rights, to acknowledge the quotes thrown up by conservatives as proof of god being against homosexuality, the word homosexuality was translated from the greek from a word that nobody knows what it means and scholars actually think it doesnt mean homosexual. That didnt come until the translation. 60s. What is means is a person who paid for a prostitute. When you up pack the language and people say its the word of god, its more complicated when you add in history, when you add in lynn linguistics. Im fascinated by how few people are willing to admit that. Next call is from jodi, hi, jodi. Hi, hi, youre there. Hi. Listen, first and foremost, i want to thank you so very much for your promotion of higher education. It is what at 36 years old pulled me through everything that ive been through in my lifeti lifetime and leads me to a question that ive contemplated for 32 years, as my sons are 31 and 32. When and do i tell them about tragic things in my life that will help them understand me, but i feel that to be so luxurious, i cant hurt them . I have a hard time figuring out when and if to tell them about those things. Guest you know, thats a hard choice for me to make on your behalf, not knowing your sons and not knowing your life. What i will say is that sometimes the beauty of fiction or of a medialike film is that it allows you again, entrance into a topic that might be hard to talk about and i would encourage you, if you thought it might be easier, to maybe find a book or a movie or something that resonates with what youve experienced, watch it with your kids, and then start a conversation about it and then, you know, very somehow slide in from that make believe world into something that youve experienced for real. You know, i think that i would like to believe that your kids at this age would certainly give you the benefit of the doubt as a mother, as someone who loves them and wanted to protect them, to understand why you might not have told them something earlier, but theyre certainly old enough to support you, i would think, at this point. Host next call is nia. Nia is in lynnbrook new york. Caller first of all this is a fabulous show, id like to thank you for hosting. Also id like to say to jodi, i loved 19 minutes because it took the perspective of not the victims, but of the perpetrator and what it did to his family and i always, when i watch the news, think, oh, that poor family. You know, but then i think what about his mother or their father. I always think of that and being a mother of four, i know how deep that can go. And i think its brilliant that she did it from that perspective and i cant tell you how much i love your books because they are from different perspectives and i always believe in food for thought and the power of words. I think that vocabulary can make or break a conversation and i think it can make or break a person in explaining yourself and getting your feelings across. So thats all i had to say and its a pleasure. Host mia, did you sympathize in a sense with lacy throughout 19 minutes . Caller yes, the ending of the book, i will not say i was hysterical crying. Guest good. Caller thats how i know it was a thank you, maam. Guest i think it does back to what we said, not everyone an all good or all bad. To say that a bad kid is created by a bad parent. What if a kid is so broken he takes a gun into a school and started shooting. That was much more interesting for me to tell it from that perspective. Thats one of the books im most proud of. Its taught as curriculum in a lot of schools. Ive learned and spoken at many schools about gun violence and about bullying. This year alone, there have been 294 Mass Shootings and 65 of them were in schools. We can to better as a country. I firmly believe that gun control is a big part of it. And that there are ways to have common sense gun reform that do not involve stripping everyone of their arms like the pro Second Amendment people thinks what everyone else on the other side is saying, thats not true. But there is no reason for a civilian to have an ar15, that just isnt. Theres no reason to not have background checks and longer waiting periods to bring up one of my other books in mississippi, you have a longer waiting period to have an abortion than to buy a gun and thats problematic for me. And you know, one of the stories i love about 19 minutes is a school visit that i made. I was up on the stage, it was one book, one Community Thing for the school so all the kids had read 19 minutes and i gave a presentation and talked about research ive done and working with the Columbine Police and working with the grief counselors after columbine who had been told to tell every parents, your kid was the first to die and didnt suffer. And all the parents felt when they learned they had been lied to talking to the survivor of another shooting in minnesota, kevin braun, who had a friend die that day when a 15yearold named Jason Mclaughlin walked in and killed two kids. Imagine the aftermath of that. When i was talking about that, i offered the floor for questions and one boy stood up im standing next to the principal. A boy stood up, yeah, i wanted to say i brought a gun to school this being october and i was going to kill some of you, but i got this book that day in english class and thats the reason i didnt kill anyone and the principal was like, didnt know what to say. And another girl raises her hand and says, yeah, she was in a wheelchair and she said i came home one day and i was in tears and my mom said whats the matter and she said, i am invisible in school, nobody knows notices who i am. Nobody sees me. And i told my mom, i wanted to kill myself. And she was so upset that she ran out of my room crying and i opened my backpack and 19 minutes was my english homework that day. And when you write fiction, you dont think of the lives of people, but its humbling and the coolest thing about my career. Host well, our last caller was not going to give away the ending, were not going to give away the ending to any of your books because you do put a little thing into them. Guest yeah. Host but i wanted to open this interview and both of my producers said no with this question. Guest so youre going to do it now. Host no, but i want today open the whole three hours by saying that jodi picoult in a spark of light. Does hugh know . Whose hugh know . No, he does not and i dont think hell know for many, many years. Everybodys got to read the book to find out what were talking about. Host im not giving it away, but i think it would have worked. [laughter] barbara in kenwood, california, hi, barbara. Caller hi. Am i on . Yeah. Yes, maam. Caller its sonoma county, california. Host okay. Caller hi, jodi, i read all of your books and i have a Lending Library in my salon and make everybody read them. Guest thank you. Caller ive got two children and one is going to be a writer god willing. You said a lot of creativity many could from things that mothers worry about and one of the things that i worry about, i grew up reading literally almost a book a day and i dont have an advanced degree, but im a wellread person because i love books. My concern is, and do you think about this and worry about this, is my potential future nonborn grandchildren with social media and people dont interact and the bullying, and the coarseness, and i feel were losing humanity. Do you ever think about that, how its going to affect our future generation and literacy, the way its going . I am really concerned. I cant even go to lunch with someone without them picking up their phone. Do you have remarks and do you think about that . Yeah, Great Questions and i think those are almost two different questions. What i would say is as a former eighth grade teacher, i think its really important to teach kids how to love to read. Not what they should be reading, but how to who have to read and one of the things i remember actively doing as a teacher is trying to identify that for every kid. It might be a classic novel for one person, but for someone else, it could be sports statistics, for someone else it could be manga. All of that is valid literature and enhance a child love picking up something to read. You have to get outside of your own prejudices and say, well, i want my daughter to read, you know, ann of green gables. That may not be her thing, but as long as she loves reading she may come around to something you love, too. Thats one thing. The social media and bullying is a real concern. One. Things i came across researching 19 minutes, bullying has changeded so much. When i was a kid i used to i remember being in like fourth grade and if you were mad at someone, youd go i call you out, and youd meet outside after school on the baseball field and wrestle with them. Nobody does that anymore. Now days its all through texts and snapchats and all kinds of social media. There was a website at one point when my kids were in school set up to humiliate girls with comments on it. The thing about social media is that it divorce,bullying from responsibility. You dont even have to look at your victim in the face anymore and you can still affect hurt with words and i do think thats an issue. Its something that i call kids out for when i am talking about 19 minutes. They tell me often they would never treat anyone the way peter was treated in their school. I said would you sit with him in the cafeteria if he was alone . And i think its important for kids to realize that inaction is also an action, and they have to make that choice to make the connection, especially because all of social media and our devices are intentionally keeping us in our own cubicals. My family will be the first to tell that im wildly addicted to my own phone and i think about it all the time. How did we ever get through life without having a phone right at our fingertips to do, but i think that there has definitely been a cost to that and i remember talking to a friend of mine who is a psychology professor at vasser who helped me do research for my books and we talked about how kids today, they dont know how to knock on someones door and say, hey, do you want to go to the cafeteria and grab dinner . Because we set up their play dates for them when theyre little and theyre all on social media waiting to see if theyre in the cafeteria. That taking the personal step is really difficult for them. You know, i dont know the answer to that. Definitely social media has pluses and many minuses as well, but i do think its really important to call people out on bullying through social media, even when you wouldnt necessarily see it as bullying. I write everybody who writes me back. Everyone who writes me a fan letter on email, gets a response from me. Even the people who write me hate mail and i do it because i want them to know theres a human being at this end of the computer and i think thats really important. Host what do they say in their hate mail . Is this a common theme. Guest no, its usually based specifically on what the book is about. When i wrote small great things, i had a lot of mostly white men telling me, you know, oh, youre a race trader. How dare you say im a racist, i have black friends, blah, blah, that kind of thing again. And all i could think was, wow, maybe you should go back and reread the book. I dont know. But i would always take the time to explain very calmly and clearly, well, i understand what youre saying, but let me phrase it this way. And try again to, you know, model the lessons in small great things. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt and you cant reach everybody and thats okay. For spark of light, my favorite piece of hate mail actually came from a man in cleveland. Host hank. Guest hank in cleveland. He wrote me and i woke up to this email i read where you said Justin Kavanaugh should read your book and change his mind about abortion. Hes a catholic, take your ridiculous curls and just shut up. I laughed really hard when i got that email and i wrote him back and i said, im guessing you havent read my book. Fuelly, this is actually this is my business and i quite like my curls. I laughed because it was such a silly piece of mail, but on the other hand, it has a real undercurrent to it and i talk about this a lot in my talks. Because people want to know what the reaction is to spark of light, and i read this piece of mail and who in the audience has not had a man who wants to cut her down and make fun of her looks in some way. Thats the easiest way for a man to try to chop a woman down and it happens all the time. Host next call for jodi picoult. Denise, youre on tv. Caller i want to start, im a huge fan. The first time i was ever exposed to any of your books, i had a coworker we were talking about books and have you ever read any books by jodi picoult. No, i havent. And she had a copy of my sisters keeper, i read it in two days and i fell in love with it, and backtrack because youd written so many before and now so many after and im just wondering, i was always a fan of ohenry and every time i read one of your books i think of ohenry because you get that punch in the gut ending and im wondering if when you write, is that how youre looking at driving your story to that point, i get that holy cow moment and i love it. I mean, i love your characters and theyre so complex and i love everything that youve written and i just wonder if you have that in mind when youre actually writing your books. Guest first of all, thats a tremendous compliment. Very nice to be compared to ohenry. I dont usually write with that in mind. I would say that for me, my characters drive the story as much as the plot does, but i do try to keep a balance of both of them. You know, but like i said, its really fun for me to have a twist and to be able to lead you, you know, a merry chase through the text so that you can get back to it, go back to the beginning to see what youve missed. Well, some of the Favorite Books that you list, we ask the authors who appear, what are their Favorite Books and reading right now. Margaret mitchell gone with the wind, life of pi, and different books. Gone with the wind is the book i point to that made me want to be writer. Its funny and ive gone back to it in recent years and there are some serious issues i have with implicit racism in the book, but taken as a sort of encapsulated story of its time, i remember reading that book when i was 13 and i recommend miesed swaths ever it and used to act it out as rhett and scarlet. At 13. Here i was a girl from new york, and i could smell atlanta burning and could feel it around me and she did that with words and i remember the moment i stopped and thought, i could do that and that was really the first time i thought of myself being a writer in the longterm. Not just doing it as an avocation, but as a vocation. And that book will always be really special to me. The life of pi is the most writers love letter book. When i read it, i was absolutely blown away because its really not a book about a kid in a raft with a bengal tiger, which is what it looks like on the surface. Its a book about power of stories and to whom the story belongs. Does it belong to the writer or belong to the reader . What does that equation looks like . I remember reading to the end of this book and putting it down, oh, man, i wish i had written that. I was jealous i hadnt thought of it. And the last book, the book thief, this is the book i feel like markus zusak is a poet. The flow of his words, the beauty of his language, it feels like youre lying in tide of words, so beautiful and its so brilliant, ultimately its a book about words, again, the power of words to hurt and the power of words to heal and how that can be impacted on both a political level and a personal level and i love that book so much that i wanted to turn it into another art form. You know, which is why im make it go into a musical. Host does the story belong to you or to us as the reader . I think its a little of both. Thats the beauty of writing. How many times have you gone back to a book that you loved, when you go back to it, its like a whole new book. Who you are at the moment you read it is different than the last time and youre going to see things in the writing and pull things out of the characters that are very unique and that is thats magical that the text can say the same because what you bring to the table as a reader changes. The experience of reading the book is different. Thats a phenomenal thing for a static art form. And because of that, i feel like im contributing as the writer, but you are contributing equally as the reader. Theres actually a line in between the lines that sammy and i wrote that says the writer makes the house, but the reader makes it a home. Host confederacy of dunces. And a quote, i chose to be an author i knew i would write the same quality of book no matter what i wrote and wanted to reach more people. What is the caveat to that . Well, im never going to win the nobel prize for literature and not going to win a National Book award, never even going to be nominated. Guest its true. There is a weird, i would say artificial rift between literary and commercial fiction and i think it is a marketing decision. It used to be way, way, way back 20 years ago when i started writing. It really was a stidecision, dii want to be considered a literary author or the literary authors win prizes, and commercial authors reach more readers. And i made the literary decision to be a commercial author, my book is my book, and readers to read it. Theres a thought that if you write quickly, you cant write well. Masters of the art form are taking decades between books. Thats true, there are wonderful writers who take 10 years between books, but there are also wonderful writers who write frequently and are considered commercial fiction writers because of the frequency of their writing. I have seen plenty of, you know, National Book award finalists who write books that i would call navel gazing books, very little happen and so much character and you know, nothing else, and that may work for a lot of people, the language may be beautiful, but i also think that there is great merit to someone who can tell a story and do it in a way that gets you to think compassionately, that may foster empathy. I also think the gender gap plays in there. If a man writes a book that includes marriage or family, it is considered the Great American novel. If a woman does it, its romance or womens fiction. Host in fact, you sent out a tweet. [laughter] a couple of years ago. New york times raved about jonathan francens new book, is anyone shocked . Would love to see the New York Times rave about authors who arent white males that literary darlings. Guest it was a slow news day. I tweeted that it was not his first review in the times that week, it was his third and i thought that was a little excessive. We only have so much print space and there are lots of really great deserving authors who were not jonathan francen. And that got expanded and jennifer, a terrific writer, jumped on the band wagon, yeah, theres gender discrimination. And we were at the forefront and we were told that women should write better stories, more compelling stories and why they dont get awards and why are they bellyaching . Those are pejorative terms. And vita arrived and vita crunches the numbers, oh, yeah, we have statistics now, there is gender discrimination in publishing. Thats not to say that mr. Francen is not a great writer. There are women writers who are equally as great. Host how many books have been put into its around 35 to 40. Host how many books have you sold, do you think . I dont know, its a lot. Host are we in the millions . Yeah, yeah, yeah, i think its 15 or 16 million at this point. Ill be honest, i dont keep track of it. Its incredible. I thought that the only ones buying my books was my mother and her friends and she doesnt have that many friends. Host a spark of light, came out a couple of weeks ago, prior to that, small great things, off the page, samantha van leer as coauthor, 2015. Leaving time 2014, the story teller, 2013. And thats recent books. Were up to 26, i believe it is, the first book out ever in 1992, songs of the humpback whale. Whats the theme of that book. Guest so songs of the humpback whale is a beast of a book. Its about a mother and daughter and relationship that they have. The mother is in an emotionally abusive relationship with her husband and she winds up taking her daughter and going crosscountry where her brother lives. And her husband is a whale researcher. And the male whale sings to the female and whoever has the best song. We had jane the mother telling the story forward. Rebecca, telling it backward. And then intersecting in the middle of america, in the middle of the book and then we also have three narrative narratives of the three men in her life. This man sam, at an apple orchard. Her brother and her husband, as she try to convince jane is to come back. It was structurally a nightmare that i have more brain cells at the time, i was closer in age to the daughter than i was to the mom at the time that i wrote it, which i find interesting when i look back on it. Host is this the book that got turned down by no, so i had, i had written a creative thesis at princeton, like writing a novel with training wheels. I was under the tutelage of amazing mary morse, my mentor and taught me everything i know as a writer. And it was as a creative thesis that i wrote my first novel. She helped me whip that into shape and i used that to get an agent, had 100 rejections, but i kept writing. Thats what you do when youre a writer and my agent signed me on the strength of that book, but sold the book i was writing during that period songs of the humpback whale, and no one red the other. Host kathy from monroe, michigan. Thank you for holding. Youre on with jodi picoult. Caller thank you for taking my call. Hi, jodi. Guest hi. Caller i am so glad to have known that were you going to be on today and that i am watching this show. Guest yay. Caller i know it. I have read most all of your books. But seeing and listening to you today i am i just have to tell you, i am so impressed with you in that youre beautiful, youre incredibly bright, not that i thought you were stupid before, but. [laughter] you are a real thinker. Youre wellspoken and i just quickly have to tell you before i ask you my question, one of my girlfriends and i each have a jodi section on our book shelves at each of our houses. So ments. I love that, thats great. Caller you are famous, two quick questions. We have been mispronouncing your name for the last 25 years, your last name. Now, would it be too tacky if you were to put on one of your the back of your book in pren th they paranthesis. We have been saying picoult. If youre trying to say my name, were happy. Host the pronunciation we use here at book tv is in big letters, pee and dash koh. Picoult. What others authors do you have on your book chef . Oh my lord, why do you have your own department, why dont you move into the library. And john im going to say his name wrong. Jonathan kellerman, steve martini, and a bunch of biographies. And memoirs. Im really right now into that. So lets see. Well, i cant think of all the others, theres so many. Peter, you wouldnt believe it. Host kathy thanks for calling in, appreciate it. Any response to that. Guest very sweet, very, very sweet. Its funny ive said if youre trying to pronounce my name, im happy. I dont care how you butcher it as long as youre trying. And even my own husband will say picoult because people can find it that way because they expect it to sound. I dont think if i would do a pronunciation thing in the back. I remember many years ago, there was a website where authors were invite today call in and speak their name, and then a student could go to the website and click on it and hear how they pronounce the authors name. Its got to be somewhere out there still. I dont know what it is though. Host hopefully we gave them all a little bit of guidance there. If youve signed off on how we pronounce it. This is a tweet from diane. Ive never read jodis books, but im watching her speak and im very interested. Guest thats nice. Host and we got that email from Martha Barkley as well. Guest thats an interesting question because i think of my books as very substantially different from each other. What i would encourage you to go to my website, incredibly clever jodipicoult. Com. And go through the synopsis and one that interests you the most. Theyre moral and ethical dilemmas and one might speak to you more than another. I guess thats what i would suggest to begin with. As you know, im partial to small great things, i think its something everyone in america should read. And i think with politics in america right now spark of light is an excellent choice as well. I say again, theyre about so many different issues, pick the one you like. Host jodi picoult, you do have opinions about issues, and you express them, but if your books do you express those . Are there more than one opinion in your book . Absolutely. Thats the point of writing a controversial issue and making sure every point of view is accurately represented, even if its something that i vehemently disagree with, i will make sure that it is in the book somehow. I will give you an example of that. When i was writing sing you home about gay rights and gay parenting in america, i focused on the family, theyre part of Exodus International which is very antigay and believes that through jesus christ you can choose to not be gay. They believe in conversion therapy and conferences called love wins out or love won out, where you can be not gay anymore. And when i was writing that book, my eldest son actually came out to me and all of a sudden, i wasnt just writing something theoretical, i was like a mom on a mission. And i had to go out and i did this interview and one of the things that i talked about with this woman who is involved in pr, to the organization was i said to her do you worry that some of the rhetoric that you use in your organization may actually inspire hate crimes against lbgtq people . And she said to me, thank goodness that hasnt happened. And i went, excuse me . I said, have you heard of Matthew Shepherd . And she went, who . And i said, would you excuse me a minute and i had to go to the bathroom and splash water on my face and calm myself down. Because i was so angry in that moment because my journalist hat had slipped off and mom hat had gone back on and for the purposes of the book i had to go back there and finish that intervi interview and create that point of view was there. And i cant tell you how vicerally opposed i am, but its in that book. Host this is from melissa, i want today get through 19 minutes, but being a teenager during the rise of school shootings, this was hard. Ill try again when theres no further possibility of recurrence. Guest you know, like i said, i have two children who are Public School teachers right now. My daughter, the one to cowrote between the lines and off the page, fourth grade, part of her training learning what to do in active school shooting. They gave teachers a rubber door stop, stopping a door for coming in. If you have special needs students make sure you have head phones and some kind of ipad or something that can distract a child into being quiet if they need to be. The fact that this is part of a masters curriculum in education makes me absolutely sick. America can do better than that. Host we have a few minutes left with our guest jodi picoult. And youre on the air. Caller good afternoon, ive been watching the program all afternoon. Id like a suggestion from you. I come from a family of readers. My mother was a reader, i am, my daughter and my two granddaughters are. I have two younger grandchildren whose parents dont read and every time i try to get them interested, theyre not interested. What can i do . So how old are they . The kids. Caller 11 and 14. Guest 11 and 14. Boys, girls . Girls. Guest girls, okay, so give them a copy of between the lines start there. Thats exactly the right age. Host 11 and 14. Guest 11 to 14. A middle to y the book. Im going to hammer home, whatever it is your kids are into, your grandkids are into, if one is into sports, find a book that resonates because its about sports or sports statistics. If one of them loves comic books find something again thats shown in a pictorial format for them. There are so many different ways to read that dont always take the form of a classic novel, that we might have been forcefed when we were younger and we were 11 or 14 years old. You know, try to inspire for them something that hooks them. That just gets nem to want to pick something up, no matter what it is, to read it, it could be a magazine, it could be anything. It may not be what you consider literature, but you get them to get the act of reading and trust me, it will broaden out eventually. Host how did your parents get you into reading . So, my mom, like i said, she ran a Nursery School and she is my biggest fan, very, very close to her, i love her. And one of the things she used to do is go to the Public Library make twice a week. She could come home with a stack of books and read them and i want to be like her like you cant imagine. I started when i was three years old and i remember the day that i knew how to sign my name, it meant i could get my library card and i did, and i went to the library and got to bring home a stack of books just like my mom. For one of my birthdays, i asked for a reading light beside my bed like my mom. She modeled that behavior and i think its important for our last caller, if her grandchildrens parents arent readers, she is. Model for them. What is it about the story she loves and maybe she can share that with her grandkids and they can pick up and read and tell her about. Really, my mom was the big reader in my family and i just wanted to be like her. Host mel, from st. Petersburg, florida. Mel, go ahead, have a few minutes left. Caller oh, my goodness, im just enjoying the second, you know, telephone stories. [laughter] i hope i get to hear the real one now, finish up. I wondered what your Favorite Book was that you read ever, and thats your Favorite Book that you are writing or have writt written . So, you know, its hard for me to pick a Favorite Book because ive had so many Favorite Books. You know, the ones that we talked about before, the book thief is one of my favorites and gone with the wind is one of my favorites and the life of pi is one of my favorites. Alice hoffman, she makes writing look easy, its never easy. Turtle moon, is the first book i read of hers, ive become a degree voted fan. And my thaudaughter, i used to d a princess character who needs nobody and i loved reading that to her and i like to think maybe it made her into the girl she is today and at different points of my life ive had many, many different favorites and thats okay to keep evolving. As i said before, right now my current Favorite Book that i have written is small great things because of the affect it had on me as a human being and i reserve the right to change my mind in case i write something else. Host and you mentioned 25 years to write that book. Guest yeah, i had a lot of false starts where i wasnt able to write about racism the way that i wanted to because it really wasnt my story to tell the way i was telling it. And it wasnt until i began to think about the wrote of the white ally and what that means. How not to be a savior and not to write a story that belongs to a person of color, but walk up to a person that looks like you, hey, open up your eyes, this is what you need to be seeing. Thats an Important Role to fill in literature about racism and im glad that i was able to do it. Host and you told us that youre currently reading a book called fox by cristina dalter. Guest i dont know why im reading it, its about a dystopian world where a women have a bracelet counter and can only speak 100 words a day. Youre not allowed to read or do anything with the transmission of information, and you know, feels like a slippery slope sometimes. Host linda is in marksville, louisiana and linda, you might be our last caller on book tv. linda, you know the rule. Youve got to turn down the volume op on your tv and just listen on your telephone. Yes, maam, talk through your telephone. Dont listen to the tv. Caller okay. Hi, can you. Guest hi. Caller can you hear me . Listen, the a few years back, im almost 80, okay . And i had started a new job and i had, you know, no friends at the time, but the books, and we became friends we both love she called you jodi, and i said, youre on a first name basis now. [laughter] but the question i wanted to ask. There was a blurb like you said about kavanaugh and i was all for kavanaugh and i was curious if you want today comment on that. Host tell you what, linda. I apologize, but were out of time. So were going to have jodi picoult end our interview where we began it, the opening question to you was, you said that Justin Kavanaugh should read your new book a spark of light, why is that . Because i think it does a serviceable job of showing the real women who have to make a decision about Reproductive Health care that might involve terminating a pregnancy. It also shows the risks that we will lose if roe versus wade is overturned. All of the Reproductive Health care that women use clinics for and need that will disappear when those clinics disappear in the south, in the bible belt. What i would really like is for him to move beyond perhaps his original views on abortion to open husband mind up and hear the voices of other women. Host for the last three hours we have been talking with best selling novelist jodi picoult about many of her 26 books, her most recent, again, a spark of light. This is part of book tvs special fiction edition of in depth. Next month, its author brad meltzer. Thanks for being with us. Guest thanks for having me. Youre watching book tv on cspa cspan2. Every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provid provider. This afternoon President Trump will deliver remarks in yuma, arizona on immigration and border security. Watch live coverage beginning at 5 15 p. M. Eastern here on cspan2 and also online at cspan. Org or listen with the free cspan radio app. Week nights this months were featuring book tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2ment the tonight starting at 8 p. M. Eastern university of california berkeley law professor and former