KEY POINTS:
It seemed like such a good idea at the time. "Will you chair Jodi Picoult's Auckland event," they asked me. "Yes, yes," I replied blithely. No problem.
Cut to Picoult and I standing in the wings of the stage at the Dorothy Winstone Centre peering through the curtains at hundreds of expectant faces. I'm not sure why it hadn't occurred to me that there would be quite so many people there. Picoult is queen of the best-sellers, after all. Her latest novel, Change of Heart (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) had an initial print run of one million copies and shot straight to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. She's sold 200,000 books in this country alone which, given the size of our market, is huge.
Picoult is a lot less fazed by the crowd than me. She's in the final days of a three-month publicity tour, is suffering from tendonitis because she's signed so many books and is "desperate to be in my own bed with my own husband beside me" - yet still she seems excited to be there, meeting her fans.
Normally at Readers & Writers Festival events I feel positively youthful compared to the rest of the audience. But here, as well as the grandmas, there are rows and rows of teenage girls. At question time they're asking Picoult about stuff she's posted on her website or telling her how they and their school friends discuss the issues raised in her novels.
Picoult is famous for writing about hot topics: high-school shootings, stem-cell research and, in this her 15th novel, the triple whammy of religion, the death penalty and organ transplants. But, like all her tales, at the heart of the story is the complicated relationship between a parent and a child.
Change of Heart is the story of carpenter Shay Bourne who's on death row for the murder of June Nealon's daughter and her husband. Shay has decided he wants to donate his heart to June's desperately sick daughter. Only trouble is, he's scheduled to die by lethal injection which will stop his heart and make it useless.
The story is told through the voices of Maggie the lawyer who signs on to help Shay in his fight for death by hanging, Michael the priest who finds himself questioning his faith, Lucius the HIV-positive prisoner in the next cell, as well as June the mother who knows that only the heart of the man she hates can save the life of the child she loves.
When it comes to research, Picoult enjoys putting in the hard yards. For previous novels she's lived with an Amish family and observed cardiac surgery. For this one, she spent time on death row in an Arizona prison and is still pen pals with one of the condemned men.
"He keeps me up to date with TV shows I've missed and sends me amazing artworks he's made using the pigments out of M&Ms and Skittles because he doesn't have access to paints," she says. "He's a lovely man. The only thing is that during an armed robbery 10 years ago he injected a man with battery acid and killed him."
Picoult herself is against the death penalty. "I was when I started the book and I was by the time I'd finished it - but for different reasons."
Her best-sellers are laced with her liberal politics but she's careful not to blatantly shove them down readers' throats. "I just want to make people think, get them to question their views and the things they believe are absolutes," she explains.
A tremendous worker, Picoult has already finished the novel that will come out after Change of Heart. Her publishers may find they have to print far more than a million copies as, thanks to Hollywood, she's about to reach an even bigger audience. Her most successful book, My Sister's Keeper, is in the process of being turned into a movie.
The crowd gasps when Picoult tells them the director wants to change the ending. "I made the same noise but a lot louder when they told me," she admits. "That's why I'm now banned from the set."
Picoult talks and talks and talks. She tells us about her home in New Hampshire, her menagerie of animals, her husband and three kids and how the issues she tackles in her stories aren't topics she's hit on while monitoring the media but, "the things I worry about when I'm lying in bed at night".
When I leave, Picoult is still signing books. She's had to limit the number she'll sign for each person to two because of the tendonitis but it's clear she'll be scribbling for a while.
- Detours, HoS
