'Sister's Keeper' Draws A Crowd, and Tears
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 29, 2009
The faces of the audience members leaving "My Sister's Keeper" have gone all Monet: Their features are blurred by a dewy sheen of tears smeared over cheeks and noses, they look fuzzy and far-off, as if they may never see happiness again. Why did we ever come to this movie? Why do we DO this to ourselves?
Inside the dark theater, Kleenex had been at the ready since the 15-minute mark, when on-screen a frail toddler received a spinal tap. Gasps of disbelief began around the time a lawyer insinuated that a mother didn't care about her own child. By the time the movie reached the land of the doomed teenage love affair, the soft sobs had begun. It was hard to tell exactly who started it, because every seat in the small Bethesda theater Friday night was full of rapt viewers, including at least two teenage girls uncomplainingly huddled on the aisle floor. "What is this, 'Transformers'?" a woman had hissed to her companion as they tried to find seats in the packed house before the movie.
It was not "Transformers."
It was Jodi Picoult.
Picoult, the woman responsible for all these tears, the blockbuster author whose fans call themselves the Pi-cult. Picoult, the patron saint of impossible decisions and weepy moral dilemmas, and creator of her own particular breed of horror story best described as Ovarian Gothic -- horror not of the supernatural, but of the domestic. Picoult, the woman whose books inspire fierce devotion mixed with pockets of self-loathing. Haven't heard of her? You are such a man.
"My Sister's Keeper," the movie, is based on "My Sister's Keeper," the book, and is the first Picoult novel to be adapted as a feature film. A fair number of people went to see it this weekend: It took in $12 million at the box office, about a 10th of the "Transformers" haul, but more than the broad thriller "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3" or broad comedy "Year One."
The fans who trooped into theaters did so not with anticipation, in some cases, but with grim resolve, the same way that they approach her books:
"I don't know why I read her," Katie Gore moaned as she prepared to enter the late show at Regal Cinema. She's in her 20s, the median age for an audience that appears to span ages 16 to 60.
"It's like watching Lifetime," her friend Elizabeth Crowe agreed. "Why do we watch Lifetime?"
"When I finished her last book," said Jillian Hooker, "I threw it against the wall."
And then, hating themselves a little bit, they go into the theater.
This is what they watch: A child is conceived to be spare parts for her older sister, who is dying of leukemia. After 11 years of painful procedures, the girl finally balks when her parents want her to give up a kidney. She sues them for medical emancipation, ripping apart the family, which also includes a neglected brother with a learning disability. The lawyer who takes her case has a debilitating illness, and the judge overseeing the trial is recovering from the sudden death of her own middle school-age daughter.
This widespread misery is a hallmark of Picoult's novels, which have been released like clockwork almost every year since 1992. In "The Pact" (1998), for example, two close-as-blood couples must deal with the aftermath when their dating children form a suicide pact in which the son ends up living. Plus: sexual abuse. And: a murder charge. Bonus: borderline marital infidelity. In "Change of Heart" (2008), a woman loses her husband to a drunk driver, remarries, and then, while pregnant, loses her second husband and young child to the psychopath who murders them when he comes to construct the nursery. This is the first 10 pages. Later, the condemned killer will return, this time wanting to donate his heart to the woman's second child, who has a congenital heart problem and will probably die without a transplant.
If a character decides to pop into a CVS in a Jodi Picoult novel, chances are good the cashier she meets has an incurable illness, a crumbling marriage, an estranged mother and several outstanding parking tickets.
"I always dread when she's coming out with a new book," sighs Erin Miller, who writes a book blog for About.com. "Because it's such an emotional roller coaster and I don't want to go through it." But then she reads it. Dammit, she always, always reads it. Will probably see that stupid movie, too.
How the fans love Jodi. How they love to debate whether Sara in "My Sister's Keeper" is a witch. How they love to decide she is, but that Cameron Diaz is still not good enough to play her. How intense the fans are. How they are --
" -- The word you are looking for is 'rabid,' " Picoult supplies helpfully, on the phone from her home in New Hampshire. She genuinely appreciates her fans, says she responds individually to each e-mail.
In Bedminster, N.J., 15 women have banded together to form the Jodi Picoult Book Club. They read only Jodi Picoult books. "It's hard sometimes," says founder Anne Marie Verdiramo, of the emotional turmoil. "They're so gripping. . . . She brings up so many issues you never thought about."
Picoult is asked about the stomach knots she causes in her readers. She laughs, apologetically. "Sometimes I wonder, what is wrong with me? Why do I do this to people?"
She does it to many people. Her books have sold nearly 10 million copies nationwide since 2001, according to Nielsen BookScan, which does not track sales before that year. Every single copy of "My Sister's Keeper" is currently checked out of the Montgomery County library system. Same for "Handle With Care," Picoult's most recent book, in which a mother decides to sue her obstetrician, who is also her best friend, in a "wrongful birth" suit, because the woman's child was born with a horrifying bone disease and four years later she's thinking she should have gotten an abortion. The woman's other daughter? Bulimic.
At Potomac Library, branch manager Lindsey Hundt points out that they carry "My Sister's Keeper" in large-print, tape, CD, Playaway and Spanish language -- a variety reserved for only the most popular titles.
Anything else, Ms. Hundt?
A pause.
"I have never had a man come in and ask for Jodi."
Could men handle Jodi? Would men be strong enough to withstand the cleansing power of a good, hard sob fest? Men, the sensitive readers among them, would say Jodi Picoult is emotionally manipulative. But what they would really mean is that she made them cry.
At the Georgetown AMC movie theater on a Saturday afternoon, Aley Smith and Arika Pierce prepared to enter a matinee screening of "My Sister's Keeper." The women are sisters. So they anticipated much grieving in the course of the next two hours, although Smith was worried about rumored changes to the ending as written. The book closes with an awful, nauseating plot twist. "It has to end that way," she said. Anything less would deny the story its true power of catharsis.
Smith learned that Picoult was interviewed for this story. She had a concerned question: "Did she seem like, well, a happy person?"
She did, in fact. Picoult was warm, and funny, and seems to have an extraordinarily blessed life (helpful husband, close relationship with her three kids), which might help explain rather than contradict her stories: "There's a part of me that believes -- completely erroneously -- that if you do all the research and put yourself through the wringer of researching something like teen suicide," she said, "then you'll never have to deal with it in your own family."
It's possible that Picoult's fans read her for the same reason -- as an inoculation against the far-fetched terrors of real life, or as emotional scenario-planning for the unbearable.
It's more likely that she is a permission slip for gut-wrenching emotion. On every page, the subliminal message: Go ahead. Let it out, no one's watching.
At the Georgetown theater, Smith turned to her sister. "Ready?" she asked.
Pierce nodded. Thus steeled, they went inside.
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