“I do a lot of work, and a lot of homework. Some people write an incredible book every 10 years, and some writers write an incredible book every year.” What’s upsetting to Picoult, she says, is what she calls “the inherent bias in publishing,” that if you write a book quickly, it’s bad. “I think it’s because I’m used to producing quickly. “Something that I find interesting might not be a good topic for me to write at that moment it has to strike something personal in me.” Picoult says she has an entire box of ideas that she hasn’t gotten to because there’s always something that she wants to write about that takes precedence. Picoult always researches her topics extensively.“Whether it’s medicine or law, I go out and learn what I need to know from the people who know it,” she says.
“There’s a humanity to elephants that’s counterintuitive ,” she says.
“Elephants will come up to the bones of another elephant and touch them, stroking them somberly, ears drooping, the way humans behave at a funeral.” Picoult also learned that elephants are known to break into research camps, take the bones of dead elephants being worked on, and return them to the spot where the elephants had died. “There is serendipity in writing-you find a fact and start digging.” She traveled to an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee, then to Botswana, observing herds. Intrigued with the elephants, Picoult began to do research, and what she found amazed her. It was the antithesis of being a human mom.” “Here I was writing about a mother and daughter and about losing someone you love, and how do you ever come out the other end? My last child was leaving for college, and I read that elephant mothers and daughters stay together their entire lives until one of them dies. In Leaving Time, a daughter searches for her mother, a scientist who studied grief among elephants, and who mysteriously disappeared when the daughter was a young child. It’s really how we define good parenting, raising children until they can survive on their own.” Leaving Time turns it over and is born out of what happens when being a good mother means letting go of your children. Leaving Time, her latest, will be published in October from her new publisher, Ballantine, and according to Picoult, brings things full circle: “My first book was about a growing mother-daughter relationship ,” she says, “and I was closer in age to the daughter when I wrote it. Perennial favorite and bestselling author Jodi Picoult has 21 novels translated into 34 languages in 35 countries.
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