How can I be so sure? Personal experience. There was Keene High School, after all, and the irate parent who wanted to ban The Pact. The subsequent decision of the school board rang loud and clear: Not only does Keene continue to teach my novel, it has added two more to class reading lists.
It's a heartening sign for an unorthodox writer.
Jody Picoult | She Has Issues
Jodi Picoult has a way -- some reviewers call it downright clairvoyant -- of homing in on a moral issue just as it breaks into national debate. She has built a career on fiction that seems to riff off the talk shows, leap from the headlines. At 38, an age at which many would be thrilled to publish a first novel, she has published 12 -- books that deal with prickly dilemmas: from stem-cell research to teenage suicide to incest, abandonment and sexual abuse. You might conclude that this is a woman with a difficult history.
But you would be wrong. She grew up in a happy family on Long Island with parents she adores: Her mother was a nursery-school teacher, her father a Wall Street analyst. She had what she calls "an uneventful childhood," attended "ordinary public schools" and ended up at Princeton, studying creative writing with Mary McGarry Morris and Joyce Carol Oates. After graduation, she held a string of jobs -- ad copywriter, technical writer, junior editor, eighth-grade English teacher -- before enrolling in Harvard for a master's in education.
She never put that degree to use. By 25, she was married. By 26, she produced a first child and a first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale. Almost every year since, she has published a book on a different subject. And she has managed to raise a family in Hanover, N.H., along with "a dog, a rabbit, two Jersey calves, and the occasional Holstein."
Her work is intensely research driven, based on field trips to remote settings or visits to medical labs or endless conversations with lawyers. "I am amazed when a writer says he doesn't do his own research," she says. "How would he know what to use?" It is precisely when she is deep into parsing the facts or conducting an interview that lights go off in her brain, taking her in new directions. In an exchange with an Eskimo, for instance, she learned that he regarded language as a weapon (once uttered, it can change another human being's mind), and so hit on the resolution for The Tenth Circle, a forthcoming novel about date rape and the abyss between "yes" and "no."
Her recent books -- My Sister's Keeper (about harvesting bone marrow), Second Glance (about eugenics) and Perfect Match (about sexual abuse) -- are as popular in Europe as they are here precisely because they deal with human conundrums that seem ripped from the front page. True to form, her latest, Vanishing Acts, is about post-traumatic flashbacks. Her 2006 novel, Tenth Circle, was written during the current boom of graphic novels and so promises to be half-pictures. It's enough to make you scratch your head and wonder, "What next?"
-- Marie Arana
