Jodi Picoult - 2009 National Book Festival

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC I miss number of fans you could just see the girls making custom t-shirts and having her sign it right behind this wall she's also a fan of books herself she waited dutifully in line for John Grisham to sign her son's book but Jodie is a is as you probably all know just tell you a few quick things about her she's she's a Princeton grad and a one time high school teacher she's a former New Yorker and New Hampshire mom she's the champion of a sisterhood of readers that's welcomed more than a few brothers she is also a sort of curator of private hurt that has turned into a public forum where everyone can share pain and loss grief joy love but she's a creator of indelible characters who thrive in her care and sometimes she has to gently ease into death they die gently in her hands and sometimes we do too which is why her next her latest novel is called handle with care and we're grateful to have her here today Jody Pico I'm just really glad that John Grisham opened for me today thank you all for not leaving the tent when he did that's great it is really a pleasure to be back here today I actually I don't do a lot of festivals and I I beg to come to this one this year because I'm so excited to be back here and I don't have a lot of time to talk to you guys so I'm gonna give you a really brief history of how I got here talk to you a little bit about handle with care and where that book came from and then I hopefully will have some time to either tell you a funny story or get some questions from you um a lot of people asked me when I knew I was going to be a writer I can trace it back to fourth grade when I had a teacher who I really hope is dead right now you know I was in I was in school we came back to school after summer vacation and she she told us that we had to write what we did over summer vacation which as a former teacher I will tell you is the world's worst assignment so I wrote about the piano that I had practiced on all summer and I wrote it from the point of view of the piano and I got it packed the next day and I got an F and she said you know I didn't ask for a creative writing assignment now to be honest she did not ask for one either and my mom my mom marched down to the principal got me transferred out of that class and after that I had a series of terrific teachers who knew I liked to write and really encouraged me to do so so much so that I wound up applying to colleges that in the 1980s had an undergraduate creative writing program and I was lucky enough to go to Princeton to work with living breathing writers where like every other beginning writer I was told write what you know unfortunately it didn't take me very long to realize I knew absolutely nothing you know I had grown up in the suburbs of New York my parents are still happily married I have a little brother and I like him you know I thought some kind of you're right or aren't I supposed to have a little anguish or something going on and and I remember calling my mom from college and asking her if maybe there was just a little incest I didn't know about in our family but no instead I realized that if I was gonna write what I was gonna have to do instead was to write what I was willing to learn instead of what I knew and that sort of geared me up for a whole series of novels where I do tons of research even though I write fiction which is supposed to be made up right you know if you actually look up the word fiction in Webster's dictionary its defined as something invented by the imagination or feigned we know that it covers genres like fantasy with worlds that don't exist and genres like romance with men that don't exist and yet except for my husband who's right there and yet you know I've been doing this now for about 20 years and I've never just sat down and made it all up and in fact there are some novels that I spend more time researching than I do physically writing which is pretty remarkable what I'm going to do now is briefly tell you about some of the research that went into handle with care' and I'm really excited to be here talking about handle with care because if there was ever a health care reform book this is it now Hamlet with care the basic plot is that it's the story of the O'Keefe family and that means mom Charlotte dad Sean big sister Amelia and little willow O'Keefe willow is seven years old and she suffers from a condition called osteogenesis imperfecta she has type 3 which is the most severe kind you can have without dying at birth and that means that over the course of her life she will have hundreds of thousands - bone breaks of bran breaks she will be no more than about three feet tall she'll have severe respiratory complications she will need rodding surgery in her thighs and in her back a lot of hearing issues dental issues in other words a very compromised physical existence but kids who have osteogenesis imperfecta for the most part are 100% mentally all their if not even smarter than their peers because when everyone else is running around on the playground they're sitting down with their casts on their leg reading a book instead like many other parents of children with disabilities the O'Keefe's find that they are extremely financially strapped because insurance doesn't even begin to cover what they need for their daughter and charlotte thinks she has found the answer in a wrongful birth lawsuit if she sues her obstetrician for not telling her in advance that her child was going to be born with this condition she might wind up with a huge monetary payout in the millions there are only two catches she's going to have to stand up in court and say well if I had known about this in advance I would have terminated the pregnancy words that her own daughter is gonna hear her say and the obstetrician that she's suing well that happens to be her best friend so that's the premise of handle with care' and I get asked a lot well where did you come up with this one because it's not really on the radar well it actually began for me on book tour when I was reading the New York Times Magazine and there was an article in there about a woman who had sued for wrongful birth after she had a severely disabled child and you know I read about it a wrongful birth lawsuit basically says that you're suing your obstetrician for not giving you information that should have been given as part of normal medical care and you know the idea is that a lot of parents do this because it does give them a big payout so my immediate visceral reaction was it's just disgusting I can't believe a mother would do that and then I wondered Wow how do I make that judgment so fast and I decided I really wanted to learn a little more about it so I met and talked to this mother as well as other people who had sued for wrongful birth and what I learned was that her friends and family completely vilified her for doing this in the first place and like every other family that I did meet that had a wrongful birth lawsuit none of them ever really wanted to terminate that pregnancy they loved these kids to death but they can't figure out a way to give their kids the best life possible and this seems like a really easy little white lie all you got to do is stand up in court and say well I would have terminated the pregnancy now wrongful birth has a pretty interesting history in this country the first wrongful birth lawsuit began in 1966 it was filed in New Jersey and the court said the doctors were to blame but they didn't think that the court should get into the business of deciding which embryos survived and which didn't and so they actually just overturned the case and wouldn't rule on it in 1973 something very different happened Roe versus Wade passed and then the next wrongful birth lawsuit popped up in 1978 in New York and this time the court found in favor of the family that was seeking financial damages because they said the obstetrician had not given them all the information possible right now over 20 states in America allow wrongful birth suits as well as many European countries including France and Britain they certainly contribute to the sense that Americans aren't litigious and when you look at it from a parent's point of view it's a medical malpractice suit did you get the appropriate standard of care during pregnancy where all the tests done and were they read correctly from the obstetricians point of view it's a morality question who gets to decide what type of life is worth living is it the doctor is it the patient is it the baby itself in other words it moves past that controversy of abortion into which child should be terminated if that is an issue I met with a lot of OBGYNs to hear their point of view as well and the story that I like to tell the most came from an OB who lives in my hometown who was sued because she had a client a patient who had a baby that had severe severe defects a lot of disabilities and during all of the ultrasounds she kept telling the parents there's something wrong there's something wrong I don't know what it is but there's severe abnormalities and this fetus the parents decided to have the baby and then they sued her for wrongful birth it turned out that the child had a genetic disorder called trisomy 9q it had never been diagnosed before until this child was born in 2004 in spite of the fact that the diagnosis did not exist the jury found in favor of the parents and awarded them 2.3 million dollars in 2006 the Supreme Court of New Hampshire reversed that decision and most of the wrongful birth lawsuits that you hear about involve children who have severe physical and mental disabilities but I kind of wondered what would happen if I created a situation where it was a very compromised physically compromised child but mentally this child was extremely bright and that's what led me to osteogenesis imperfecta now osteogenesis imperfecta affects one in between 1 in 10,000 and 25,000 adults I mean Americans and the reason the range is so big is because it goes undiagnosed a lot there are people who just break their bones a lot who never know they have oh I but the most severe form really pretty visible because like I said before these kids only wind up being about three feet tall often have twisted limbs have severe complications many or wheelchair-bound it's been around for a long time the first diagnosis was in 1895 but there's an Egyptian mummy that was found from 1000 BC who they have now proven to have had osteogenesis imperfecta um there's a guy named Ivan the boneless who was from 9th century Denmark he was a prince who used to get carried into battle on his shield because he couldn't walk and he had osteogenesis imperfecta and most recently the painter Toulouse Lautrec was posthumously diagnosed with osteogenesis imperfecta to learn a little about this this condition I wound up spending a lot of time with families of children that have oh I and I did everything from spotting them in the playground because not only do you have to worry about whether the kid Falls you've got to make sure no one bumps into him or runs into him to changing diapers - at one point riding with a mom in a car the son Matthew is in the backseat and we were taking him home from school they can't ride the bus because the bumps in the road give them micro fractures and so she said to me as we got to the driveway can you just take Matthew out of his car seat and I went oh yeah I mean I've done this 8 thousand times in my life and I went to go reach in and I realized oh my gosh what if I'm the one who snaps his arm this time and this of course is something that these parents deal with really on a daily basis one mother told me how she had used to dream about pinning a note to her daughter's blanket and leaving her in a basket when she was an infant after she had something like her 40th break before she was 1 year old and saying on this note maybe you can do a better job another mom told me about her daughter who had the morphine jump she was allergic to morphine and she had broken her femur and was waiting for surgery in a hospital and the mom literally had to lie on top of her daughter so that when she went like this from the morphine she wouldn't jar the bone and hurt herself even worse they told me how you go about getting a kid who is wearing a cast that goes from chest all the way down to their knees to pee a little kid but the doctors do not tell you which involve putting trash bag liners on the open inside that's left right the genital area so that you don't splash the cast which they're going to be wearing for four or five months they told me how you can learn how to make a splint from a magazine that you find in the back of your car and then I met with the kids themselves like Rachel who told me that every time she breaks a bone it feels like lightning under her skin and that the whites of her eyes flash blue which I heard from many parents which is really creepy and freaky from little hope who because she has oh i type 3 is only about that big maybe about 2 feet tall but is 6 and a half years old and at the restaurant was writing the names of her family and writing a story on the back of her placemat and the waitress just could not get over the fact that this little toddler was so smart and she hated being called a toddler but probably the most interesting woman I met was a woman named Cara Sheridan Cara is an adult who is a graduate student right now getting her PhD in body image for disabled young women she just got married and she was a Paralympian in 2004 a swimmer for the American team in Greece and Cara also has oh I and Cara was the one who told me that rotting surgery is for the spine which are not often covered by insurance will cost up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a pop how an insurance company will only fit a child in a wheelchair once every five years now I don't know about you but my child between age five and ten he changed considerably and would not fit in the same sized wheelchair she told me how she used to be very careful when she was living in Florida to not make more than seven hundred dollars a month because then she wouldn't be covered by Medicaid why would I write a book like handle with care because most of you thankfully you're probably never gonna come into contact personally with someone who has oh I or have a family member that's got it well it certainly raises awareness about the condition which is a great byproduct of a novel but it also really asks us I think to ask some very important questions in this country first of all what kind of message does a wrongful birth lawsuit send about how society value is a person with a disability but then again who has the right to judge a parent who sees on a daily basis the suffering of a child with a disability and finally and maybe most importantly especially right now to what extent does health care coverage or the lack thereof lead desperate families to file lawsuits like this and how would changes in health care coverage make it easier for a parent to give a child with a disability every advantage possible I know that I love coming to this festival because you've got the Capitol on one side you got the Washington Monument on the other and you can stand up here and say I really hope that's something I get to see very soon in my lifetime maybe maybe if we all keep clapping the Obamas will show up what do you think so I've got about ten minutes left and I want to open the floor up to your questions so if you've got a question I believe do we have mics there's no way you're gonna get to a mic all right let's see I'll just try to call oh there are mics look at this all right great you get to go first hi I work in the medical field I just wanted you come across any families when given the choice to not continue care on their kids decline that choice and continued the care on the kids you mean of the oh oh I I did not run into any parents who you know who wanted to have or who are offered the chance to have kids taken away from them what I did run into and this comes up in the book and it comes up very often with parents who have children with oh i is many parents are accused of child abuse because they go into a hospital and if you are working with a physician who doesn't know your child there are they are with 40 breaks in their arm that are all healing and of course the immediate the immediate reaction in the health care community is the parent must have done this short question what inspired you to do all the research on eugenics what inspired me to do all the research on eugenics great question she's talking about a book called second glance which happens to be my personal favorite and is it's a rollicking ghost story but it's also very much about the eugenics project in Vermont and other places in this country in the 1930s the reason I got inspired to do that was I actually was looking up ghost stories and I happened to stumble across the story the real-life story of what was going on in Vermont in the 1930s when a bunch of very very intelligent people professors and and politicians in Vermont were championing the idea of keeping Vermont a tourist community by getting rid of people who they thought were a social and economic drain on it and so they went around and they made up these genealogy charts of degenerate families you actually didn't have to be related to be a degenerate family but they went into prisons and poor houses and mental institutions where you know go figure you never found those white Protestant Yankees but you found a lot of Catholic French Canadians and a lot of Abenaki Indians and in Vermont they wound up sterilizing a lot of those people and I was so fascinated by this because I didn't know that America was in the business of eugenics I didn't know that Hitler thanked the states in America that did his homework for him and I thought you know if I'm writing a book about things that come back to haunt us this was just what I needed to write about yes I was just wondering your character Jordan McAfee yeah he said a few times that he only wants to hear the truth from his clients about how the American legal system actually works no actually what a great question why are you asking me ask John Grisham but uh the question was about whether or not Jordan McAfee who's one of my favorite lawyers he's come back in a few books whether or not he he says I want to hear the truth from my clients whether that's true is that what lawyers want actually they don't they really don't because they get in trouble if you are a defense attorney and your client tells you the truth you then can't have him up on the stand because he might impeach his own testimony so actually you really don't ever want to know what your client did if you're a defense attorney which i think is a fascinating thing and interestingly you know it really makes law about who can spin the best story and to be honest if you know you're in a murder trial and your defense is that the defendant happened to be the queen of England at the moment the murder was committed if you can get the jury to believe that well hey good that's all you need to do it's really about storytelling which is kind of interesting because I think we like to believe it's always about the truth yeah I loved my sister's keeper the book and the movie how'd you feel about the change in plot I should probably ask whether nick cassavetes or anyone related to him is here first but um here's the deal uh what most people don't realize about the transition of books to film is that we authors have the lowest spot on the totem pole often they don't ask us anything we have no idea what they're casting what they're doing we don't write the script I had a couple of unfortunate experiences during that process that involved being blatantly lied to to my face I will tell you that I think it was a good film I think the acting was stellar and I think they made the world's biggest mistake by changing the ending I heard that you published two short stories for Seventeen magazine I want to know what were those two stories and what were they about okay so this is my very first publishing experience I was in college and I had written you know this is paper basically for a creative writing class and my teacher was the incredible Mary Morris an amazing author and she finally said to me will you just go send this somewhere and I thought like where I mean you're my teacher I'm writing it for a class and she said no no send it to Seventeen magazine so I mean I was poor I was a student I couldn't even afford seventeen so I just looked up the name of the editor and then put it back on the shelf you know and I wrote this I wrote this cover letter and I sent the story off to her and it was called keeping count I think that was the first one and about three months later I had this phone call on my answering machine at college from this editor saying they wanted to pay me for my short story and I was like first I called all my friends because I thought they were teasing me you know but then I called her back and I thought you want to pay me I would have paid you I mean this is incredible and she wound up buying that short story and then another one after that they came out in February and August of 1987 and they were both about my high school boyfriend who totally broke my heart so it's good revenge and the funny thing is that you know I guess people knew that they were about him some people who knew us both and who they were about him and people like he didn't even know who had known a friend of a friend like came up and threw things at him after they came out that's great I just finished reading plain truth uh-huh and I really loved La Hathaway and that character so I was wondering where she came from and whether we might ever see her again in the future question you know I haven't thought about bringing Ellie back usually when I bring a character back it's because I feel like I haven't finished telling their story and I do think her story has pretty much been told you sort of know where she and Cooper going after the end of playing truth and what's going to happen in their lives and and I'm happy with where we left her what she came from really was the the rubbing up of two justice systems the idea of the American justice system where if you confess you know basically you're going to jail and the Amish justice system where if you confess fabulous you're forgiven and everyone welcomes you back into the fold so if you have a client as an American lawyer who happens to be Amish and she confesses it's gonna be a real hot mess for you and that was you know why I wanted to make her sort of this tough-as-nails attorney who really didn't like to get involved personally with clients because Katie has to teach her as much about herself as she has to teach Katie about what justice is in this country hi I was wondering um what would be your best piece of advice that you would personally give to any aspiring writers especially younger ones great question I get asked that all the time as you can imagine the first thing I would say is if you want to be a writer you should be reading I know that even now when I read yeah right I mean we all read the book festival yeah you know and and here's the other thing especially if you're a teacher of young kids don't tell them what to read let them read what they want to read you know you know I used to teach eighth grade English and I remember yeah you know we taught all these great short story masters and you know we did we did all of that stuff but then the kids would also be reading Stephen King and that's totally cool and you know I hate that distinction in this country between literary fiction and commercial fiction because I think it's arbitrary and stupid and frankly you know the poetry and prose tent in the fiction and fantasy could all merge it would be fine you know and I think people like to read different things too so I think reading is a big part of it because reading will inspire you and will also help you figure out where your books and your stories fit in to the the grand fabric of writing in America the other thing I would suggest is to write often and frequently daily if you can just so that it becomes something that you can do on demand I don't believe in waiting for a muse I have three kids I don't have time to believe in waiting for a muse and so when I sit down and I'm writing I'm writing and there's some days I'm really good in it and there are other days I'm like you know oh gosh I need to check my email again I mean you know there's some days that you work well and others you don't but on the other hand it is a job even if it's one that you love and you have to get used to writing on demand I also highly recommend taking a fiction workshop course at some point in your life you don't have to go to Princeton you can take them at a Borders or a Barnes & Noble or Community College or even at your high school probably and what that does is teach you how to give and get criticism because ultimately when you're a writer you have to become your own best critic not your editor you're gonna make more cuts probably than she ever will and so that's the goal that you're you're getting toward and here's probably the most important thing when you start writing a story and you suddenly decide that it is truly the biggest piece of garbage ever created in the history of the English language force yourself to finish it because too many beginning writers don't do that and will never know if they can I know it's scary but if you get through to the end of it you can then decide whether you want to scrap it or whether you want to fix it and that's what you really need to do hi first of all you're wonderful Thanks I have a question about the names and the personalities of your characters yeah you know these people or are they people you've interviewed how do you come up with I totally know all of them I mean you know I've with them for nine months while I'm writing but but they are made up and I get asked out a lot I get asked whether I create my characters based on people I know and I don't because the characters land in my brain they land almost fully formed and for me they come with a voice first I can usually hear them talking before I really know who they are and for me that's that's sort of the way that the story develops through their mouths and through their voices it would be weird for me too to take a character that that is already talking to me and already thinking in my brain and give them the personality of my mother for example cuz they'd wind up with two personalities plus my mother is strange you know you know it's no she's not she's great but you know I would never really do that on the other hand what I do all the time is take take stories or arguments or conversations that I've either had with friends or overheard and I give those to my characters constantly so that when you're reading them you know sometimes my friends will read them and say didn't I tell you that you know I go yeah well you did there's actually there's a great scene in the pact which is an argument between a husband and wife and it happens to be a fight that my husband and I had but every time you read it I win I think we probably have time for one more question if there is one you got one what's next I was gonna tell you if we didn't have a question that's great what is next well the next book I have handle with care' just came out hot off the presses and paperback which is very exciting good for Christmas stockings or anything you need um but the next new vote that will come out is in March the first Tuesday of March it is called House Rules and it is the story of Jacob hunt who is an eighteen year old boy with Asperger's syndrome Jacob is a really bright kid who happens like many kids with Asperger's to have a very very special fixation on one topic his is forensics and crime scene analysis and that's all fine and good until he winds up accused of a murder himself and the book is really about how our justice system usually works pretty well if you communicate a certain way but I want you to think for a second about anyone you've ever met who's autistic and how you've got not looking someone in the eye or running away if touched or not answering questions or answering them in a flat effect if a cop heard that they're immediately going to think guilt and that really creates a very interesting little conundrum and the book after that which is what I'm currently writing I'm very excited about because it is what I believe the last civil right to address in America is it is about embryo donation and gay rights so look out for that this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 5,747

Rating: 4.8222222 out of 5

Keywords: library, congress, national, book, festival, reading, literature, authors

Id: sxDxHCtuu10

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2009