Jodi Picoult

Best-selling author Jodi Picoult enjoyed considerable success over the course of a two-decade career with such books as Songs of the Humpback Whale (1992), My Sister's Keeper (2004), Nineteen Minutes (2007) and Leaving Time (2014). Picoult's novels touched on the complicated emotional matters at the hearts of seemingly average families in small towns across the United States, including issues of spousal and child abuse, neglect, sexual identity and, in some cases, major crimes like murder. What separated Picoult's material from paperback potboilers and romance novels was the quality of her writing, which often employed multiple narrators and conflicting viewpoints to present a difficult situation from as many perspectives as possible. The emotional depth of her work boosted eight of her books to the top of the New York Times' bestseller list, while five were adapted as feature films or made-for-television movies. Picoult's innate talent for rooting out the difficult truths behind families, marriages and parenting made her one of the most popular authors of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Born Jodi Lynn Picoult on May 19, 1966 in Nesconset, a hamlet on Long Island, New York, she was the daughter of Wall Street securities analyst Myron Picoult and his wife, Ellen, a nursery school teacher. Picoult wrote her first story at five years of age, and made her publishing debut two years later with a poem in her grandparents' community newsletter.. Picoult majored in writing as a student at Princeton, and while there, made her professional publishing debut with a pair of stories for Seventeen magazine. After graduation, she held down a variety of jobs, from textbook editor to eighth-grade English teacher, before returning to school to earn her master's degree in education from Harvard University. After marrying Princeton schoolmate Tim van Leer in 1989, she began writing her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale (1992), while pregnant with their first child. The book drew immediate attention for Picoult's use of multiple narrators to tell the story of a speech pathologist that flees her abusive husband, only to become embroiled with a younger friend of her brother. Her ability to unearth the dramatic qualities from lives in suburbia, as well as her talent with alternative viewpoints, led to critical praise, but the birth of her first son, Kyle, put a challenge in her path to provide a follow-up work. She explored the difficulties of balancing work and family in her second novel, Harvesting the Heart (1994), which followed a woman's search for self-discovery as both an artist and a mother. In order to aid Picoult's writing career, her husband transitioned to a home office in order to become a stay-at-home father; this assistance allowed her to turn out two more novels, Picture Perfect (1995) and Mercy (1996), in rapid succession. Both received solid critical notices for their sensitive portrayal of marriages in the grip of spousal abuse and primary characters in the midst of transformation. Picoult scored a huge critical and creative success with her fifth book The Pact (1998), which concerned the aftermath of a suicide attempt between two teenagers. The book became her first to be adapted to the screen as a 2002 TV feature for the Lifetime Network, and the channel also adapted her seventh novel, The Plain Truth (2000), about a murder case in an Amish community, into a TV feature in 2004. Picoult continued to address difficult issues regarding families and children in her subsequent novels. In Salem Falls (2001), she focuses on a school teacher who is labeled a sex offender after being falsely accused of a relationship with one of his students, while Perfect Match (2002) concerned a district attorney who discovered that her son may have been sexually abused by a member of the clergy. In 2004, her novel My Sister's Keeper, reached the Washington Post's yearly list of best fiction books. The book, which concerned a teenaged girl, raised to provide bone marrow for her leukemia-stricken sister, who sought legal aid to protect her rights, was adapted into a theatrical film with Cameron Diaz, Abigail Breslin and Alec Baldwin by director Nick Cassavetes. It also made headlines that same year when the American Library Association named it the seventh most frequently challenged books by U.S. schools and libraries for issues regarding sexuality, drugs and violence. Picoult became involved with comic books in 2006 when her novel, The Tenth Circle, divided its narrative between traditional passages and illustrated panels drawn by artist Dustin Weaver. The unique presentation drew the attention of D.C. Comics, which invited Picoult to write storylines for its Wonder Woman title. She imbued five issues of the series in 2007 with her own personal touches, including the main character's struggle to balance her two careers - military personnel and superhero - with family life. That same year, Picoult scored her first novel to reach the top of the New York Times bestseller list with Nineteen Minutes (2007), which concerned a divided friendship at the core of a school shooting. As with My Sister's Keeper, the book was at the center of controversy in Picoult's New Hampshire home town, where the title was removed from its high school because administrators felt that the setting too closely resembled their own town. The success of Nineteen Minutes finally established Picoult as a major literary force, and sent her next seven novels to the No.1 spot on the Times bestseller list. She refused to shy away from hot-button subject matter. Change of Heart (2008) employed her trademark multiple narrator style to present all sides of a death-row inmate's decision to donate his heart to the terminally ill child of a family he had murdered, while Handle with Care (2009) touched on issues of abortion and traumatic child diseases. House Rules (2010) continued her unbroken streak of success with a "Rashomon" (1950)-like structure concerning an autistic child accused of murder, while Sing You Home (2011) was drawn from her own experience with her son, who came out regarding his sexuality to her while the pair collaborated on the play "Over the Moon." In 2013, Picoult entered the young adult fiction market with Between the Lines, a novel she co-authored with her daughter, Samantha van Leer. She returned to adult fiction the following year with another top-ranked bestseller, Leaving Time (2014), which followed a teenager's search for her mother, a zoologist that disappeared after an accident at a habitat for former circus elephants in New England.