Kelsey Patterson
Jodi Picoult is the number one New York Times bestselling author of 29 novels. Her works have been translated in 34 languages, in 35 countries, and she has over 40 million copies in print of her books. She has narrated audiobooks, written five issues of DC Comics' Wonder Woman, is the co-librettist for multiple musical adaptations, and in her downtime, runs a teen theater group that performs original plays written by her, with all the proceeds going to charity. We are delighted to welcome Jodi Picoult to The First Fifty Pages.
Jodi Picoult
Thanks for having me.
Jenn Delperdang
I would just like to applaud that. It was great. So your latest book, By Any Other Name, marks your 30th novel, and wow, what a story. There is so much to dig into in this book, and I do envy all of the readers who are going to get to see you talk about it on your book tour. Can you share a little bit about By Any Other Name with our listeners?
Jodi Picoult
It is the story of two women in 1581, Amelia Bassano is a female playwright. She isn't allowed to have her work in front of the public because she's a female, so she pays a man for the use of his name, and that man's name happens to be William Shakespeare, and it's also about her descendant in 2024 Melina Green, who writes a play about her ancestor and can't get it onto a stage because there's a lot of male domination In the theater world. So the question is whether she will also write herself out of history in order to see her work on the stage. And what's changed in 400 years for women and what hasn't. To me, it's a book about how women have been written out of history by the men who recorded it, about how women's voices have been silenced and how that is still happening.
Kelsey Patterson
Because even when I was trying to talk about it with my family, I was like, "I don't think this is going to be very concise." And they're like, "No, I'm interested." And I'm like, "I am sorry. I am really jumping all over the place." So I think you've got it down to like, three to four sentences of like, "this is what it is." So you have an incredible FAQ page on your website. I found the details on how you start a book absolutely fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about that and how By Any Other Name, began?
Jodi Picoult
Yeah, absolutely. So I always write about the things that are keeping me up at night, and I don't think it's any great secret that it's quite hard to be a woman in America at this moment. We're literally watching our rights being stripped away. So that, I think, was kind of going on in the back of my head. And then I happened to read an article in The Atlantic by an amazing writer named Elizabeth Winkler, called "Was Shakespeare a Woman?" And I, as an English major, fell in love with Shakespeare, particularly his proto feminist characters like Beatrice and Portia and Rosalind and Kate and, you know, maybe there was one day in a class where a professor said, you know, there's a question about whether or not Shakespeare wrote all his plays, and we all laughed and went haha, because that was so silly. And you know, I didn't really think about it for years, until I read this article in The Atlantic, and in it, Elizabeth Winkler stated that Shakespeare had two daughters that survived infancy, and he taught neither of them to read or write, they signed with a mark, and it stopped me dead. I just sat there, and I said, there is just no way that the person who created Beatrice and Rosalind and Kate and Portia would not have taught his own daughters how to read and right? I do not buy it. And I started going down this rabbit hole, because one of the people that Elizabeth Winkler cites in that article is a woman named Amelia Bassano, who is someone I had never heard of, and I wanted to know more about her and why she is considered a potential author of the Shakespearean plays. And the more research that I did, the more I realized that all of the weak links in Shakespeare's life, places where academics have gone out of their way for years to twist themselves in knots, to explain away gaps or things that don't make sense about how Shakespeare could have possibly written about a certain topic, everything that feels iffy for Shakespeare, Amelia's actual life seamlessly covers, and she also, on her own merit, whether or not you believe she had anything to do with Shakespeare, in 1611 became the first published female poet in England. That is a tremendous accomplishment in her own right.
But people don't just show up in their 40s and start writing, right? So you know, clearly she was writing before that. We just don't know what she was writing.
Kelsey Patterson
I do think you make a pretty good case that it might have been Shakespeare's stuff.
Jodi Picoult
Thank you. I think so, too.they.
Kelsey Patterson
Your novels have been called powerful, provocative, thought provoking, challenging, frank, uncomfortable. And as I was reading this book, I thought this could go down as your most controversial book yet, and you do talk about this in the author notes of the book, the way you craft the story, and it lays out, you know, the plausibility that we've already kind of touched on a little bit, that Shakespeare did not write his own works, and that there were multiple authors, possibly multiple women, who sold their plays and poetry to him. So You've obviously done some really immersive research in your writing career. What was the research like for you? For this book?
Jodi Picoult
Oh my gosh, there was so much research. First of all, I think it's worth saying there are two halves in the book, right? There's the modern section, and then there is the historical section. So the modern section was research through life. Because, like you pointed out, I do write librettos now, and I have written multiple shows now that have a young female protagonist. Everything that Melina Green hears in the book fictionally about her work is something I was told to my face about a show that I wrote, that it's too emotional, it's too small, it's about a young girl's coming of age - nobody wants to see that. It's theater for young artists. It's for kids. I was told that at a time when there were two male coming-of-age musicals on Broadway at the same time. We know that 70% of ticket buyers for Broadway are women, so they're expected to go and enjoy stories about young men, and yet their own stories somehow don't merit being on stage? Just doesn't make any sense to me. So I kind of lived through some of what Melina feels.
The historical stuff. Was really immersive. So, you know, in a way, it was, I think, like writing fantasy, because I had to recreate Elizabethan England, and so that meant talking to experts. It meant doing a lot of historical research, doing ridiculous Googling, like, did people have windows? And there were two resources that I used in particular to create the world that were invaluable to me. One is, God bless them, somebody took all the daily records of Queen Elizabeth's entire reign, and put them online so you can literally see how it was recorded every day, what happened, who was there, you know, all in the original language, basically, of the court. And when I write about a joust, for example, that Queen Elizabeth has at court, that really happened. When I say that Alfonso went out on a mission and Southampton was on that mission. That really happened. Everything in there is absolutely historically accurate. The other piece I used is a map called the Agas Map, which Deb Harkness, who is an incredible writer and also happens to be a professor of this time period introduced me to, and it's really cool because it's a map of modern England, London, that you can basically enter all the places that existed during Elizabethan times and see where they are. So that was really helpful to me in figuring out where I could set things like rendezvous between Amelia and Southampton, or where, where, you know, the places where Amelia was living and where her family was living, and how far it would be if she walked them, and all that other stuff, where the where the theaters were, that was really important too.
But most of the research came from this book that is a journal by Simon Forman, who is this astrologer-slash-hack-doctor that Amelia went to go see when she couldn't get pregnant after having a bunch of miscarriages. And he was just a fabulous guy who wrote all about her, but also tried to have sex with her, and she turned him down. That also is in the journal, and it's in the Ashmolean Museum, so you can read it, if you want to. And every detail that we know about Amelia is life. The actual facts of her life come from that particular document. So, you know, for example, we know that she was Italian. Her family came over from Italy to become the recorder consort to Henry the eighth, and then stayed on to become the recorder consort, the players for Queen Elizabeth. She was a hidden Jew. She couldn't show her religion, but that was her religion. She was given a classical education starting at age seven after her dad died, when she became the ward of a countess. When the Countess died, and Amelia was age 12, she wound up kind of in limbo and was stuck with her brother, the Countess brother, a man named Peregrine Barti, who happened to be the ambassador to Denmark at the time, and who the summer she was living with him, did go to Denmark and went to the palace, met with the King and Queen, attended a state dinner where an astronomer named Tycho Brahe happened to be a dinner. His supernova is the first scene in Hamlet. And Tycho Brahe's relatives were also there, and their names were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. So again, she's living with this guy, so she's either with him or he's telling her about this when he gets back. The next year, she becomes the mistress at age 13 to the Lord Chamberlain of England. He was 56 at the time. She wound up staying with him and basically running his house and being in court with him for 10 years until she got pregnant, at which point he settled a sum on her, married her off to her cousin, who was a real wastrel, and it was not a good relationship. The guy blew through all of her money. She was left with a baby, a husband she hated, and no money, and she needed to find a way to take care of her family. And at that point, I think, she started writing, and that's kind of where I think her unholy deal with Shakespeare might have taken place. So those are the facts that we know about Amelia, and they all come from that particular diary of Simon Forman. And of course, the other thing I did was, like, reread every Shakespearean play.
Jenn Delperdang
As I'm reading this book, one of the things that I do really love about your writing is that I feel like I can just trust the facts, because you do put so much in there. So instead of having that doubt, I just sort of went with the story. Hearing you, hearing you say these things, it just really does add another level to the story that I've just finished. And so By Any Other Name is, you know, a lot, there's a lot of fact, right, a lot of history there, but it is so much more than the research. And I really love the character of Amelia Bassano. And by some magic sorcery of your pen, you know, you create an opportunity for readers to meditate on the current emotional, hot button issues that are in our lives daily. You don't tell us how to feel, right? But readers are going to have feelings. Reading this book, right? Kelsey and I were talking about our feelings.
Kelsey Patterson
We didn't know rage crying was a thing, but, yeah, it is, and I did a lot of it.
Jenn Delperdang
And I said there were so many moments when I had told a friend, I'm like, I'm anger-reading this book, like I am so angry with what is happening in this story that I have to keep going, and then I need time to process. So here's the conclusion that I came to: I am grateful, so grateful, to the women who have taken on the burden to fight for a voice, for representation, for even the simplest of rights, you know, since the beginning of history. And you touched on this earlier. One of the most interesting themes of this book, I think, is the idea of who writes history, who keeps history, and who controls history. And I am still processing all of these things. And I just have to say that I love, I mean I love, when a book can do that for me. So thank you, right?
Jodi Picoult
Well you're very welcome. Well, I mean, I think the big point to remember is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, right? And the fact that we do not have many writing samples of women from the Elizabethan era does not mean they were not writing. In fact, one of the scenes that I put in there is a letter that Amelia writes to her unborn child, because that was very common. There are female academics who are studying this now, the very few letters that women wrote to their unborn children in the expectation that they were going to die giving birth. Because that happened all the time. And there aren't many of them, because if you survived, you burned it, because it was bad luck, but, but they did exist, and women were absolutely writing. Men did not think it was important to mention that or to preserve any of that, you know. And I think that there's another scene in there that I think is really important that comes towards the end of the book, and it's when Amelia has reinvented herself for the 8,000th time and is now running basically a school for young girls. And there is a girl who basically, you know, has a little tantrum, because she knows she's going to be married off. So why is she bothering to educate herself? Why does any of this matter? And Amelia talks about, she gives an allegory about when she was in the palace, about how this bird struck a window, basically a pane, and made a crack in it, and how the bird couldn't get out. The bird died, but the crack eventually, you know, altered the structure of the window to the point that they could never put the glass in without it breaking. She uses this to say, "I may not be the beneficiary of all of the experiences that I've had. You may not be the beneficiary of all the experiences you have, but your children and your grandchildren and your great grandchildren may be." And I think that as women in this country, particularly right now, we are all feeling what it is to have that collective history and to have stood on the shoulders of women who wouldn't shut up when they were supposed to be silent, you know, and maybe it has led right to this moment.
Jenn Delperdang
I was just kind of glowing about your book before, but maybe here is a question for you: As readers, how can we affect the kinds of stories that publishers choose to print or the authors they choose to support?
Jodi Picoult
Oh, that's a great question. Well, I think what you have to do as readers is read widely and read diversely. And you know, this is actually something that you guys in particular need to be talking about, because you're in a state where book bans are happening, and that is a very dangerous and slippery slope, and one I've been extremely outspoken about. We should not be controlling what other people's children read. We are absolutely allowed to monitor our own kids. I mean, I did it. Use it as a springboard for discussion. Definitely make sure your child is emotionally ready before they read something. But you don't get to say that, "Well, my kid can't read it. That means nobody else's kid can read this." The thing about books, and the thing about diversity in books, particularly the LGBTQ community, the BIPOC community, those are the groups that are being most targeted by book bans right now, is they don't just allow kids who feel marginalized themselves to see themselves reflected in literature and to maybe feel less alone. They also allow a kid who has grown up in a very narrow worldview, maybe in a very white town or with very conservative parents who've only seen one way of life, one thought, one dogma, put forth. They allow kids in a safe space to experience people who are different from them and thoughts that are different from them. So when we take those books away from kids, what we are doing is taking away their ability for compassion and empathy, and we are saying that diversity doesn't matter, and that is absolutely and utterly a lie. The more diverse we are, the stronger we are together. And in that sense, when you read, read widely. Make sure that you are giving your kids books that are written by people who don't look like you and don't sound like you, and who have had experiences that you have not had, because that is how they're going to become open-minded and caring human beings.
Jenn Delperdang
Kelsey and I are proud-crying right now. That's it. You know? It really is. So we do have something in common with you that we just have to share. You love Alice Hoffman. We love Alice Hoffman. She was one of our first guests onTthe First Fifty Pages.
Jodi Picoult
Oh, how lucky are you? Isn't she the best?
Jenn Delperdang
I think it is still one of my favorite conversations. And in one interview that I read you said that Alice Hoffman made you a hungry reader again after being burned out from being an English major. So do you have a favorite Alice Hoffman book?
Jodi Picoult
Well, you know, you know, the way a lot of people always say, like, oh, you know, my first, the first book I read by you is my favorite? In that sense, Turtle Moon was the book that I picked up when I was no longer reading for a syllabus, but when I was reading for pleasure. And I will always love that book, because it was the one that made me a reader again. But I have to say that, what is it? It's called The World As We Knew It. I think that book is one of the greatest books I've ever read. An amazing book. You know, Alice is someone who is so deft with magical realism. But that's about history. It's about regret. It's about what makes us human and what makes us monsters. The themes in that book are so rich and strong, and the thing I love about her is that she makes writing look really easy when it never is.
Jenn Delperdang
And she's just such a gracious person to speak to.
Kelsey Patterson
In all of the interactions that you've had with readers across the world, throughout your career, is there something that you see as a common thread that connects readers and the joy and love of reading?
Jodi Picoult
I think the thing that always surprises me, you know, like I'm about to go out on this book tour, right? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna see about, I don't know, 20,000 people on this book tour based on ticket sales, which is ridiculous. I can't even wrap my head around that. What amazes me is how many people come up to me and say, "I read your book XYZ at a time when blah, blah, blah," and somehow that book came to them exactly when they needed it. And, you know, I hate to say this, but I don't really write for my readers. I really write for me, right? You know and I'm always a little amazed when something that grew out of my own worries and fears, which are where all my books come from, somehow speaks to the worries and fears of somebody else. And it happens over and over and over again, and honestly, as a writer, I don't think there is a higher compliment that a reader can pay you then you helped me when I needed it most.
Kelsey Patterson
And I do think that's what's so special about your books, is that because you're writing for you and not trying to like, pick specific words that are going to resonate with readers, that they feel so relatable and authentic. And I think that is what makes them so powerful emotionally, that that's what registers with people. I know that's what registers with me every time I pick up your books.
Jodi Picoult
I mean, like, could I write a book about dragons? Now, yes, I could! But other people are doing a great job of that, and I feel like I'm going to give you the best book that I can at any given moment, if it's something that I'm extremely committed to and worried about thinking about and turning over in my own mind, you know? So I, I'm always incredibly grateful to my readers for going wherever I feel like taking them, which is, that's a gift. Not a lot of writers have that leeway, I think.
Jenn Delperdang
Well you have been working towards it for a while, right? This is a career. It is kind of the what you do. I mean, you have developed it over time, and readers trust you. You know, they trust you to deliver that.
Kelsey Patterson
And you are always one of those readers that if people are like, I'm trying to get back into fiction, and they kind of like, you know, historical fiction, or I'm just looking for a really good read, we're always like, “Okay, let's be going over here.”
Jodi Picoult
I love it when librarians are recommending me. That makes me feel great, right? It is really very sweet to hear that. And, yeah, I mean, it's, I think the fun thing about writing about so many different kinds of things, as I have over the course of my career, is that you probably can find at least one book that interests you if you read, you know, you might I like them all, but that's okay.
Jenn Delperdang
So we're, we're closing in on our time, but thank you, Jodi Picoult for an amazing conversation today. We know that readers are going to devour By Any Other Name, which will be in bookstores and libraries on August 20. Thank you for your energy in using your voice for good, and the reminder that we all have the power to do that.
Jodi Picoult
Oh, thank you so much. And thank you, thank you for being on the front lines right now in a state that is, you know, in the throes of book banning, because we, we writers see you, and we really appreciate it.
Jenn Delperdang
Yeah, something really cool that just, you know, they're announcing it today. A past president of the Iowa Library Association is going to be the president of the American Library Association for 25/26, Sam Helmick, and they are, you know, they, they are amazing. So we, we find that to be hopeful, right?
Jodi Picoult
That is great news, really good news, yeah.
Jenn Delperdang
So thank you so much. Jodi, thank you.
Jodi Picoult
Of course, thanks for taking the time today.
Jenn Delperdang
Bye, bye,
Jodi Picoult
Bye.
