About her childhood…

She was born and raised on Long Island

Picoult recalls, "I had such an uneventful childhood that when I was taking writing classes at college, I called home and asked my mother if maybe there might have been a little incest or domestic abuse on the side that she'd forgotten about. It took me a while to realize that I already did have something to write about – that solid core of family, and the knotty tangle of relationships, which I keep coming back to in my books"

About her writing career…

Picoult studied creative writing at Princeton, and had two short stories published in Seventeen magazine while still a student.

Picoult says, "The first time the editor called me to say she wanted to pay me for something I'd written, I immediately called my mom and said, 'I'm going to be a writer!'

Realism - and a profound desire to be able to pay the rent - led Picoult to a series of different jobs following her graduation: as a technical writer for a Wall Street brokerage firm, as a copywriter at an ad agency, as an editor at a textbook publisher, and as an 8th grade English teacher - before entering Harvard to pursue a master's in education.

In 2003 she was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction.

About her family…

Jodi Picoult married Tim Van Leer, whom she had known at Princeton, and it was while she was pregnant with her first child that she wrote her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale.

Her struggle to balance motherhood and her own career formed, in part, the basis for her second novel, Harvesting the Heart. For a few years, she was either delivering a book or a baby. Now, she's happy to be prolific solely in her writing… and admits wholeheartedly that she moonlights as a writer, but she's really a mom.

She and Tim and their three children live in Hanover, New Hampshire with a dog, a rabbit, two Jersey calves, and the occasional Holstein.

About her work…

Jodi Picoult, 40, is the bestselling author of fourteen novels: Songs of the Humpback Whale (1992), Harvesting the Heart (1994), Picture Perfect (1995); Mercy (1996), The Pact (1998); Keeping Faith (1999), Plain Truth (2000), Salem Falls (2001), Perfect Match (2002), Second Glance (2003), My Sister's Keeper (2004), Vanishing Acts (2005),The Tenth Circle (2006) and her newest novel, Nineteen Minutes.

Best-selling author Jodi Picoult may be best known for her novels about relationships and family, but her new project puts her in a different section of the bookstore.
Thanks to the success of Picoult's comics-inspired novel, The Tenth Circle, DC Comics has recruited the writer to pen a five-issue arc of Wonder Woman, making her the first female Wonder Woman writer.

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About her book…

The Tenth Circle
When Daniel Stone was a child, he was the only white boy in a native Eskimo village where his mother taught, and he was teased mercilessly because he was different. He fought back, the worst of the bad kids: stealing, drinking, robbing and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush – where he honed his artistic talent, fell in love with a girl and got her pregnant. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself – jettisoning all that anger to become a docile, devoted husband and father until his daughter was date raped…
Vanishing Act
Delia Hopkins has led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her widowed father, Andrew, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiancé, and her own search-and-rescue bloodhound, which she uses to find missing persons. But as she plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can’t recall. And when a policeman arrives to disclose a truth, the world she knows will be upended.
Plain Truth
Moving seamlessly from psychological drama to courtroom suspense, Plain Truth is a fascinating portrait of Amish life rarely witnessed by those outside the faith. When a young Amish teen hides a pregnancy, gives birth in secret, and then flatly denies it all when the baby's body is found, urban defense attorney Ellie Hathaway decides to defend her. But she finds herself caught in a clash of cultures with a people whose channels of justice are markedly different from her own and she soon discovers a place where circumstances are not always what they seem.
Nineteen Minutes (2007)
In this emotionally charged novel, Jodi Picoult delves beneath the surface of a small town to explore what it means to be different in our society. In Sterling, New Hampshire, 17-year-old high school student Peter Houghton has endured years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of classmates. His best friend succumbed to peer pressure and now hangs out with the popular crowd that often instigates the harassment. One final incident of bullying sends Peter over the edge and leads him to commit an act of violence that forever changes the lives of Sterling’s residents. Rich with psychological and social insight, Nineteen Minutes is a riveting, poignant, and thought-provoking novel that has at its center a haunting question. Do we ever really know someone?

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Available in The Aroozoo Library:

• Tenth Circle
• Vanishing Act
• Plain Truth
• My Sister’s Keeper

Sources:

http://www.jodipicoult.com/
http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/2007/04/a_chat_with_wri.html

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