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MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR!
Jodi Picoult was born and raised – happily – on Long Island something that she believed at first was a detriment to a girl who wanted to be a writer, ‘I had such an uneventful childhood that when I was taking writing classes at college, I called home and asked my mother if maybe there might have been a little incest or domestic abuse on the side that she’d forgotten about,’ she recalls. ‘It took me a while to realise that I already did have something to write about – that solid core of family, and the knotty tangle of relationships, which I keep coming back to in my books’.
Jodi studied creative writing at Princeton, and had two short stories published in Seventeen magazine while still a student. The first time the editor called Jodi to say she wanted to pay her for something she’d written, Jodi thought she’d made it. A quick telephone call to her mom brought her straight back to earth. ‘That’s great,’ her mom had said, ‘Who’s going to support you?’. Realism – and a profound desire to be able to pay the rent – led Jodi to a series of different jobs following her graduation: as a technical writer for a Wall Street brokerage firm, as a copywriter at an ad agency, as an editor at a textbook publisher, and as an 8th grade English teacher – before entering Harvard to pursue a master’s in education.
She married Tim Van Leer, whom she had known at Princeton, and it was while she was pregnant with her first child that she wrote her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale. Her struggle to balance motherhood and her own career formed, in part, the basis of her second novel, Harvesting the Heart. For the next few years, she was either delivering a book or a baby. Now, she’s happy to be prolific solely in her writing and describes herself as a mother who moonlights as a writer. ‘It took me a while to find the balance,’ she says, ‘but I’m a better mother because I have my writing… and I’m a better writer because of the experiences I’ve had as a parent that continually remind me how far we are willing to go for the people we love the most.’
Jodi is now an internationally popular author. My Sister’s Keeper is her eleventh novel and she appears regularly in the New York Times top ten. The sales of her 10 previous books have reached more than one million copies and in 2003 she was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction. However, before My Sister’s Keeper she had never been published in the UK.
Jodi is known for writing fictional page-turners that address controversial issues. She can rarely be found without a question on her mind, and that question usually is: ‘What would happen if…?’. Her novels mix elements of mystery, romance and the supernatural. But her recurring subject is the ambiguities of contemporary ethical issues. Her previous books have homed in on issues such as euthanasia, teen suicide and sterilisation laws. ‘If I come across a question that I can’t let go of,’ says Jodi, ‘and it’s still rolling around in my head three weeks later, that’s what leads me to want to write about it.’
Jodi says when she starts a book; she juggles a what-if question in her head, and pushes it and pushes it until she feels like she has a good story. ‘I figure out what I need to know and do my research, via the Internet or email or in some cases getting down and dirty… I start to write when I come up with an excellent first line. And then I keep going, chapter by chapter, exactly in the order in which you’re reading it. Often, about two-thirds of the way through, the characters will take over and move the book in a different direction. I can fight them, but usually when I do that the book isn’t as good as it could be. It sounds crazy, but the book really starts writing itself after a while. I often feel like I am just transcribing a film that’s being spooled in my head, and I have nothing to do with creating it. Certain scenes surprise me even after I have written them – I just stare at the computer screen, wondering how that happened.’
Jodi works at home in an attic office and has just completed her twelfth book, Vanishing Acts, about a woman raised by her father who discovers that rather than having a dead mother, she was kidnapped after a custody battle. After she wrote it, she says, three similar cases showed up in the news. She’s working now on a different kind of novel, to debut in 2006, about a comic book artist. His works, being drawn by a young man named Dustin Weaver, are part of the book. ‘It’s a picture book for adults,’ she says. Graphic novels, she says, are part of the future. ‘But I don’t think they’ll ever take over narrative fiction, because then I wouldn’t have a job.’
Jodi, Tim and their three children live in a 13-acre home in Hanover, New Hampshire with their Springer spaniel, Gus, a rabbit and two Jersey calves, Decalf and Coffee.
INSPIRATION FOR MY SISTER’S KEEPER:
As with Jodi’s other books, My Sister’s Keeper raises controversial what-if questions about issues that impact ordinary families. The book had multiple inspirations. Jodi started thinking about the ethics of genetics and stem cell research while writing Second Glance – in which an investigator of the paranormal stumbles upon a graveyard associated with the subjects of Vermont’s eugenics program. Jodi said that the information she learned during her research was so fascinating to her that she stuck it onto a separate file and turned it into a story all of its own.
Then, in 2000, she read about a Colorado couple who conceived a child so that baby’s umbilical cord blood stem cells could be harvested on behalf of his sister, who had leukaemia. The treatment worked. ‘I’ve been in touch with the mom,’ Jodi says, ‘and the little boy knows nothing. The cord blood stem cells worked. The sister knows. And they all love that little boy. If anything, they love him more.’ Although Jodi is personally pro-stem cell research, there were certain questions that haunted her: What would happen if the cord blood failed? If the sister died? If, when he grows up, the boy discovers his original purpose? Are parents who conceive to save the life of a sibling bad parents?
Picoult says that some parents who use PDG (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) to create a saviour sibling in the US, where more than 6000 procedures have been carried out, are demonised. ‘They are parents who start this process because they love their children and it’s an odd Catch-22,’ she says. ‘We trust parents to make decisions in the best medical interests of the child but when there are two children’s interests, that breaks down.’ Picoult discovered that hospital medical ethics committees in the US, which are designated to regulate such decisions, were run on an ad-hoc basis by medics who all had full-time jobs elsewhere.
Then while she was writing the book, her middle child, now 10, was diagnosed with a very rare tumour, a cholesteatoma, which grows from the inside of the ear toward the brain. Jodi and Tim were faced with a very difficult decision over their own. The traditional way to deal with this type of cancer, Jodi says, involves destroying the ear canal, making the child deaf. Instead, she and Tim, decided to go a different route that would mean many more surgeries, 10 in all, but left their son able to hear. ‘We got very, very lucky,’ she says.
‘As you watch your child undergoing a general anaesthetic for the umpteenth time, you think, ‘Let me do it, let me have the surgery instead’,’ she says. ‘We had to turn to our other two kids and say many times, ‘Yes, you are going to have to change the date or your birthday party or holiday because your brother’s having surgery’.’ The experience inevitably changed her book, which was going to be told only from the 13-year-old’s perspective: ‘I understood the mom’s point of view. When you have a sick child, everything else takes a backseat. I needed to hear from everyone. I really felt like I was sewing a quilt together with all their voices.’
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