Jodi Picoult: Trump supporters tell me ‘I’m never reading your books any more'

The bestselling US author of ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ talks to Charlotte Cripps about her latest novel ‘The Book of Two Ways’, the abuse she suffers on social media, and her next book about trans issues

It was ‘My Sister’s Keeper’ in 2004 – a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic – that really put Jodi Picoult on the map (Nina Subin)

Do you want me to tell you what is even more vitriolic than pro-lifers? Trans- exclusionary radical feminists,” says Jodi Picoult. The bestselling author of My Sister’s Keeper is talking about the abuse she gets online. A Spark of Light, her 2018 novel about abortion and women’s reproductive rights, made the pro-lifers furious. Her 2016 hit Small Great Things, about white privilege and racism in America, riled white supremacists. Her next book, about trans issues, co-written with American author and trans activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, isn’t even out until 2022, but it will undoubtedly infuriate anti-trans activists just as much as her tweets about transphobia have. 

“It was a friend of mine, the novelist Celeste Ng, who was the one who said, ‘I’m going to introduce you to something called Twitter Block Chain’,” says Picoult, her face lighting up. “It’s phenomenal. If one white nationalist says something in response to you that is hateful, they all follow each other, so you run Twitter Block Chain and it gets rid of thousands of these people.” 

The Trump-loving corner of her readership doesn’t like her criticising the president either; she calls him “the orangutan”, and even talking about him makes her want to “throw things across the room”. “I will have Trump supporters write to me and say, ‘I’m never reading your books any more’. What they tell me is: ‘I read you for your fiction, not your politics’. I tell them, ‘I don’t tell you what to think in my books… you can’t stop me from being a human being with opinions.’ I will absolutely try and have a discussion with them but if they start threatening me, calling me names, saying things about my family, I’m done.” 

The 54-year-old, who has written 26 novels, all page-turners and a staple at airport bookstores, is sitting in her office at home in New Hampshire talking to me over Zoom. Her auburn corkscrew hair is tied up in a bun and she’s wearing an aqua-marine sports top with a gold necklace that spells out “Vote”. Behind her is a sign saying “Black Lives Matter”. Next to it is a massive cardboard cutout of the cover of The Book of Two Ways, her new book. 

Like so many of her novels, The Book of Two Ways went straight in at No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s about a 40-year-old woman named Dawn, a death doula who can be hired to ease the transition from life. But when the plane she’s on crash-lands, she isn’t thinking of her steady husband Brian and her self-loathing daughter Meret, but the life she gave up 15 years ago: a career in Egyptology and an old flame, Wyatt, a charismatic British aristocrat and former colleague. 

So Dawn jumps on another plane to Egypt to find him. “You know,” Wyatt muses, “to anyone else, the mystery would be the mummy eighteen feet underground. Not the woman who showed up in Egypt fifteen years late.” 

As is Picoult’s habit, The Book of Two Ways is meticulously researched. In 2017, she went on a trip to Egypt with one of America’s foremost Egyptologists, who helped her research archaeology first-hand. But the book is much more than a romance in a tomb; it’s about a midlife crisis. 

“Men can have an affair or buy a sports car and nobody even blinks. When a woman does it, people are like ‘What has she done?’” says Picoult, who lives with her husband Timothy Van Leer, as well as three dogs, two donkeys, and a “smattering of chickens”. Her three children – 25-year-old Samantha, a teacher with whom Picoult has written two YA books; 27-year-old Jake, a lawyer doing election law in Washington; and 29-year-old Kyle, also a teacher, who came out as gay as Picoult was writing her gay-rights novel Sing You Home (2011) – have all left home. 

It was after Picoult had her first child aged 25 that she began work on her debut novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1992, the story of a mother who leaves her husband and takes a road trip with her daughter. After that, she gave up teaching for good, and started building up her readership slowly. It was My Sister’s Keeper in 2004 – a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic – that really put her on the map. It was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster in 2009, a film that angered Picoult and her fans by changing the shock ending. 

But the “biggest moment” in her life was a joint decision with her husband about 10 years into her writing career. “It was that he would be a stay-at-home dad,” she says. “It was a huge gift to me. It allowed me to throw myself into my career in a way that a lot of women don’t get the opportunity to do.” 

It enabled her to write a book a year, juggling childcare, most of them about “all the scary crap that can happen to kids”. Perfect Match (2002) tackled a mother discovering her son has been molested; My Sister’s Keeper, centred on a teenage cancer sufferer; The Tenth Circle (2006) explored date rape; Nineteen Minutes (2007) was about a high-school shooting; Change of Heart (2008) was about a sexually abused girl who needs a heart transplant. It’s all stuff that kept her awake at night. 

“In many ways it was superstitious,” she says. “‘Oh if I write about this it is never going to happen to us.’ Of course, it doesn’t happen like that.” But she’s made a career of “talking about things that nobody wants to talk about. Death is sort of the granddaddy of them all.” 

Picoult was accused of cultural appropriation in 2016 when she created a black protagonist in her novel, Small Great Things. As a white woman who grew up with privilege – she was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island – was it her place to write about racism? “I think every writer has the responsibility to ask herself, ‘Why do I think this is my story to tell?’” she says. “Ultimately the reason I did it was because I needed her voice to illuminate what white privilege is and that is what the book is about…I do have a right to open the eyes of white people.” 

Despite the contentious subject matter of her books, Picoult is labelled a “women’s fiction author”, which infuriates her. “When have you ever heard somebody referred to as a men’s fiction author? What they really mean is not that women are reading me… but that I am identifying as a woman. That what’s between my legs is what is important to them – not who’s reading my stuff.” 

Last week, she was invited to talk on a British podcast about romance novels. “I was like – what do you think I write? It’s great if they want to spend a podcast talking about that – fantastic – it just has nothing to do with what I write. I’m so tired, particularly in the UK of being mislabelled that way. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it is with your country.” I’m not sure, either.

‘The Book of Two Ways’ is published by Hodder & Stoughton on 20 October