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The heart of the matter
Independent on Sunday, The, May 11, 2008 by WORDS BY JAMES URQUHART
Should a condemned murderer try to expiate his sin by volunteering to donate a vital organ to his victim's sister? Jodi Picoult reveals how she tapped into a vein of personal trauma to write her latest thriller
After a chilly photo-shoot under a blossoming cherry outside her Sloane Square hotel, Jodi Picoult suddenly begins lampooning American interviewers. "Year after year they ask questions like, where do you get your ideas from? - to which the best answer has to be: they arrive every Thursday morning, wrapped up neatly in brown paper."
Determined not to make that mistake at least, I take a deep breath and pitch in with a really easy question for starters. So - what is the purpose of religion?
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"Far be it from me to tell you what the purpose is," she ripostes without missing a beat, "but I'd preface any answer by telling you I'm not a theologian. I learn what I need to write my fiction. Religion is something that is meant to bring people together, to make people understand what the meaning of life is, and to bring comfort."
This is Picoult in a nutshell: brisk and confident, delivering three succinct bullets on a contentious and personal matter with the implicit disclaimer that - whatever her own opinion - this statement is up for dispute rather than written in stone. Later in the interview, she promises: "If I ever get preachy, any of my fans has the right to hit me over the head with a two-by-four. The whole point of writing is to get people talking."
I pinched my opening question from a principal character in her compelling new novel, Change of Heart, in which a vagabond labourer, Shay Bourne, is convicted of murdering a seven-year-old girl and her policeman step-father. Shay becomes New Hampshire's first death-row inmate for two generations. He further inflames public sentiment by insisting that he donate his heart to the girl's critically ill sister who is awaiting a transplant, thereby enabling some expiatory good to come out of his execution. An idealistic local lawyer, Maggie Bloom, seizes Shay's request as a chance to discredit capital punishment, but her opportunistic case rests on proving organ donation to be a fundamental tenet of Shay's personal religion.
Messianic and miraculous themes carefully woven by Picoult into the fabric of her novel give the stark ethical conflicts a greater richness and complexity, but it was the individual response to spirituality that initially struck a chord. "I believe in God, but do I believe in religion? No," she explains. "The minute you organise into a religion, you're saying that if you aren't part of this group, then you are on the outskirts. And I don't buy into that. Organised religion has become a force that splits, rather than one that joins together. At the moment there's a real undercurrent in American society that says if you don't do it my way you're wrong." That "suffocating narrow-mindedness", which has flourished with the rise of the Christian right and the Evangelical Movement, gave Picoult the impetus to examine religious identity.
Picoult's worldwide fans have developed a thirst for the strong characters and contentious moral issues that collide in her tautly written ethical thrillers. Domestic abuse, teenage suicide pacts, rape and euthanasia all jostle for space in an emotionally exhausting backlist of 15 novels written in as many years. "People assume that I start to write a book by looking at the papers to figure out what the next hot issue will be," she laughs. "It's never actually like that. It's got to be a question that affects me personally, that I find myself thinking about at night, or wondering: what would I do in that situation?"
Research for an earlier book that focused on eugenics uncovered a news report that nagged at Picoult in just this manner, eventually becoming the genesis of My Sister's Keeper, the novel that brought her instantaneous success in Britain after being a Richard and Judy book club choice. The novel, in which a teenage girl sues the parents who had conceived her as a donor sibling to service her sister's leukaemia, pitches into the stormy debate over stem cell research, but its medical context tapped into more personal reserves. Years earlier, Picoult's son Jake had undergone 11 operations to address an exceptionally rare condition. She glosses over any traumatic memories, but acknowledges their percolating effect. "With something like that, I won't write about it while it's happening, because I'm too close to it; but years afterwards I'm able to let some of my own experiences bleed through into the fiction. It was only when I started writing My Sister's Keeper that that whole experience of having a chronically ill child from my own life began to inform the writing."
Jake happily survived his hospitalisation but mostly the family stay out of Picoult's fiction. Her husband, a part-time antiques dealer whom she met when she was studying creative writing at Princeton, marshals their three teenagers while Picoult is off on three-month book tours or researching new, incendiary topics. She relishes meeting fans but doesn't feel forced to write continuously while promoting. ("Frankly," she admits, "if I have clean underwear by the end of the week, that's a good accomplishment.") At home - an 11-acre corner of rural New Hampshire - she does an eight-hour day plus "the Mom thing" after school. "I get to leave my hideous, cramped, messy office in the attic every day, and I come downstairs ... they are all there and they are so not like the characters in my books. They're my safety net."
