KEY POINTS:
Why do it when you can overdo it? This message, propped against a wall in Jodi Picoult's study, could not sum her up better.
She sees me looking at it and laughs. "That's my motto. I don't believe in doing anything by half measures." Which is why, when I arrive at her grey, colonial-style house in New Hampshire on a Monday morning at 8.45am, still half-asleep, I find that Picoult has been up for four hours already.
At 5am she drove to meet a girlfriend for their 3km daily walk, which this morning required stomping through the heavy snow that has been falling all night. At 6.30am, just as the sun was rising, she returned home to make blueberry scones, help her three children get ready for school, organise a team of builders working on a house extension, feed her menagerie of animals, have a shower, tidy the house and make arrangements to pick up the manuscript of her 16th novel.
Her first 14 novels, churned out at the rate of nearly one a year, are bestsellers. Her 15th, Change of Heart, has just hit the bookshelves. I arrive with the photographer and, as we get out of the car, Picoult's husband Tim Van Leer races out and asks us to back up nearer to the building site to load some bricks.
We explain who we are. "Oh," he says, looking disappointed. The photographer, who is sylph-like and wearing a floaty skirt, could not look less like a builder.
But Van Leer has the air of a man who can no longer be surprised by anything. His wife is standing at the door, oven glove in hand, red hair hanging in wet ringlets, apologising for the cacophony, not only from the builders who are hammering and sawing, but also from the high-decibel cockerel and the geese, chickens and ducks joining in the chorus; not to mention the two braying donkeys.
She takes the scones out of the oven, busies herself around the chaotic kitchen while making tea then finally sits down, clutching a mug that proclaims another apt motto: "Life is good".
She offers the plate of scones: "Have one while they're warm. I'm so sorry I haven't got clotted cream." Picoult, 41, is an extraordinary phenomenon. Her novels, which shoot straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, are translated into dozens of languages and have made her Britain's bestselling female adult author.
Indeed, she ranks second only to J.K. Rowling in terms of the number of copies sold. "I write adult fiction," she says, "but a good 40 to 50 per cent of my readers are teenagers.
I love that if they have to grow up and move past J.K. Rowling they can move to me. From Jo to Jodi!" Although she writes commercial fiction, her novels are not schmaltzy or comfortable reading. She writes about families in the midst of huge crises and has a knack of landing on hot-button topics: teenage suicide, child abuse, stem-cell research, date rape.
Last year, Nineteen Minutes, about a high school shooting, came out just days before the Virginia Tech massacre. "People always say, 'You're so psychic,' but I don't think that's it at all. I think it's that I write about the things that I worry about and I worry about the exact same things that everybody else worries about."
Her novels often excite controversy. Recently one of her books was removed from a school reading list in New York State for "inappropriate sexual content".
Even her own son's school deemed Nineteen Minutes unsuitable for its students. "The principal," says Picoult, never one to mince words, "is a moron". Picoult, who talks non-stop, with an almost constant laugh in her voice, is nothing if not frank.
"I was complaining about you guys coming today and my husband and son looked at each other and they both go, 'Diva.' They're a reality check, saying, 'just shut up and be really grateful that you've got what you've got'.
" I ask her why she agreed to an interview. "I'm really bad at saying no." Now that we are here, though, she is gracious and unhurried, obligingly trudging out into the snow for the photograph and showing us her eyrie at the top of the house where she writes so furiously that several of the letters on her keyboard have worn away.
Her study is a jumble of boxes and papers, with posters of Picoult on the walls and weird memorabilia around her computer - an Amish Barbie doll, a cotton pod, a voodoo doll.
"We call this the shrine because where else am I going to put all this stuff?" The window looks out on to Moose Mountain and her 5ha of land near the border with Vermont. Picoult says she has learned to write while juggling all the other aspects of her life.
"It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to.
If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted, I could never get anything done." Indeed, she refuses to be daunted by a blank page. "Writing is not about being inspired, waiting for the muse to strike. You can always edit something bad. You can't edit something blank.
I'm always writing, even when I'm not at my desk. I write on my hands. I used to write on my kids' hands, too, but they don't let me any more. When I'm driving I sometimes write all the way up my arms."
Her latest novel centres on a mother whose first daughter is murdered but who gets the chance to save the life of her second daughter, whose heart is failing, by accepting the heart of the killer. "Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love?" asks the dust jacket.
Far-fetched, to say the least, it starts at a great pace but gets bogged down by long tracts about religion. "It was very deliberately released this election year," says Picoult gravely, "because America is divided on the fault line of religion." It is not her best book but it scarcely matters - it is sure to be a bestseller, too.
Despite her huge popularity, Picoult is routinely slated by literary critics: "I honestly don't get slated that badly," she says, a little stung when I bring it up.
"Except by the New York Times: I'm like their whipping girl or something. When Janet Maslin [the Times' reviewer] wants to go to town on commercial fiction she just goes, 'What's Jodi got coming out?' and takes out her beating stick."
Picoult feels she is more appreciated in Britain than in America. "I will never win a literary award in the US, because I write commercial fiction. If I win anything, it will be from England not America." Indeed, last year she was nominated Author of the Year in the 2007 British Book Awards.
Nevertheless, in Britain, as in America, she is ignored by literary circles. Not that it has damaged her self-esteem; when I ask her if she can compare herself to any writer, living or dead, she doesn't hesitate. "Charles Dickens. He wrote about moral and social evil and did it in a way that was commercially popular.
I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly My Sister's Keeper [about a girl who is born to be a bone marrow match to her leukaemia-stricken sister].
It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds." My Sister's Keeper was the breakthrough novel that brought Picoult to the attention of the mass market.
It is being made into a film starring Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin. Her novels are underpinned by thorough research and a vivid imagination. She certainly does not have much to draw on in terms of raw material. Growing up in Long Island, New York, she had a "ridiculously happy childhood".
Her father was a Wall Street securities analyst and her mother a pre-school teacher. "I really treasure my boring life," she says. After school, where she was "really focused", she studied writing at Princeton University, then took a job writing bond portfolios. At 23 she married Tim, whom she met on a college rowing team, and started writing stories in her spare time.
Her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, was rejected. "I wouldn't let it go at a rejection," she once said. "I'd keep calling until they'd take my calls just to get rid of me. If they said the book wasn't right for them, I'd ask who it was right for.
Then I'd call that person." The book - about a crisis in the marriage of an oceanographer, told in five voices - was published just before she gave birth to her first child. From then on she had to combine writing with motherhood, throwing the children at her husband when he came home from work and writing from 5.30pm to 10pm.
"I could not do any of this if it weren't for him," Picoult says of Van Leer, who eventually quit his job in sales and now works part time as an antiques dealer. She describes him as her polar opposite. "I'm the home body; I'm inside and he's always outside.
He's very physical and I am very cerebral. I'm the one who's always the life of the party and he's the one who doesn't want to call attention to himself. We're just so incredibly different, it's a wonder that we're together."
Picoult may not win literary awards but at a recent book festival she was voted "the author you'd most like to take out to the pub". "That has got to be one of the best awards ever," she says. "Based on what I write, people expect someone reserved and cold and I'm not like that at all: I'm actually very open and personable." And surprisingly accessible.
Although she gets "hundreds" of emails and letters from readers a day, she replies to each one personally. "I think you should make an effort.
There are so many books out there and they picked mine." What drives her to keep writing? "Fear. Superstition. The feeling that if I write about it I won't have to live it. Sometimes readers ask me why I am so hard on my moms in my books - I think it's because it's got to be the hardest job in the world and maybe if I write about these awful moms, I'll look so much better." Picoult says her own children - Kyle, Jake and Samantha, aged 15, 13 and 11 - are always the priority.
"To the kids, I'm just the lady who says, 'Your room is a pigsty, pick it up.' I hear that Change of Heart is having an initial print run of one million copies, but to me it's not as important as making sure that I have the right Christmas present for my son."
She describes their birthday parties as "the best kick-arse parties ever". Perhaps she is trying to compensate for the months she spends away from them, either on research trips or book tours.
"Occasionally, they come on tour with me but they find it really strange, all these people wanting to touch me, have a moment with me. Kyle once said, 'It's so weird, it's like you're a rock star."'
Last year, between her other commitments, she managed to squeeze in writing six issues of Wonder Woman at the request of DC Comics. At first she was doubtful about taking it on but her children persuaded her. And when you think about it, what could be more fitting? As she asks: "Who doesn't want to be Wonder Woman?" Picoult says her head is brimming with more ideas for novels and the subject matter remains as tortuous as ever.
Her next book, Handle With Care, is about a mother who sues her doctor for the wrongful birth of her handicapped child. "My mother read the manuscript and rang me saying, 'I liked it but I can see a New York Times review saying, 'It's a lot like My Sister's Keeper.'
I said: 'OK, wait a second. First of all, you're my mother. Second of all, if I'm going to pirate from a book I'm glad it's one of my own.' I don't care what the New York Times says: let them say what they want to and then watch me debut at number one on their list and stay there for a month.
That is the best revenge of all."
* Telegraph Change of Heart (Allen and Unwin, $37.99) is out now. Jodi Picoult tours New Zealand this month, appearing at the Dorothy Winston Centre in Auckland on May 22, and the Ilott Theatre in Wellington on May 23.
- NZ HERALD
