I went to this event last night with two of my friends who are also great Jodi Picoult fans, one of whom has like me seen her before and the other who hadn't and what a lovely evening we had.
After being introduced, Jodi came on stage wearing a beautiful jade green dress and some fab thigh-high black boots. She proceeded to tell us how the evening would go and instead of being interviewed, held the podium herself.
She started by telling the audience how the idea for her new book, Leaving Time, came about. Her youngest child Sam was leaving for University and she was to become an empty nester and it upset her more than she thought it would. She heard a fact about elephants in the wild, herd Mums and daughters stay together their whole lives until one of them dies and she wondered why we couldn't do it like that! Her research showed her that elephants are mammals with the capacity for empathy for other species as well as their own, have loss and grief and she realised that if she was to write a book about these subjects, elephants were the perfect answer.
Leaving Time is about Alice Metcalfe, a scientist studying memories and particularly the memories of elephants, who disappears the night an elephant care giver gets trampled to death, leaving behind her 3 year old daughter Jenna, the only witness to her disappearance. In the book Jenna is ready to find her missing Mum and uses her Mothers' journals about elephants to read between the lines about what may have happened, and hires a failed psychic detective, Serenity Jones, and an alcoholic detective to help her find out the truth.
Jodi then read from the novel, starting with narration from Jenna age 13 when she meets Serenity and then from Serenity's perspective of that meeting.
In her research, Jodi visited an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee for retired circus and zoo animals and visited a Botswana researcher who studies elephants in the wild, including footprints, darts and collars etc. All the facts in the novel are true, including elephants being the largest land mammal, the ridges of their ears are all different (like fingerprints in humans), there are 2 to 10 adult females in a herd led by a matriarch, babies are looked after by all the females and males are forced out just before they come into musth (sexually aware) when they then form little clots of boys. Elephants have a large and complex brain and they feel fear, pain, loss and have memories, for example, a no-fly zone for helicopters was declared after it was proved it was upsetting herds and this was due to the collective memory from 50 years before of the programme of African culling.
The cross-species empathy enables them to do things like rescue a rhino calf and there are many examples of this. Relationships forged last a lifetime and Jodi gave an example of two female elephants Jenny and Shirley who when in pens near to each other at the sanctuary when one arrived, tried to get to each other. Once they did, they greeted each other with rumbles and rubs and stayed together for life, even one standing over the other protecting her whilst she slept as they do in the wild. It turned out that 22 years previously the 2 elephants had spent months together at the same circus and they had never forgotten each other and they stayed the best of friends until one sadly died. Another example was of a bull elephant caught in a snare. He was 20 years old and would lose his trunk because of the damage (an elephant cannot live without its trunk), so someone was sent for to kill the elephant humanely. Unfortunately they weren't very good at their job, to do so humanely one must take the shot behind the ear but this person shot him in the forehead, which because of the hard skin did not kill him, so now he was in more pain and bleeding from his head and his trunk. Before they could do anything else, from over the hill came an angry matriarch elephant and as soon as the humans retreated, she went to him and stroked and rumbled to him until he passed. Although she had not seen him for years, this was her son. Elephants have been known to take the bones of other elephants and pick them up and then there occurs a personality change, they get upset and stand for hours, like us, mourning. They will also return to a spot where a herd member has died for years and act the same and have been known to break into research facilities to steal the bones and return them to the spot where they died.
Jodi informed the audience that 38 thousand elephants are killed every year, so in 10 years there will be no wild ones left, due to the poaching of the tusks. They take from the largest elephants and once they have taken from the males, next would be the matriarch and if a matriarch dies, so does all the knowledge for the herd. They would not know how to find water in times of drought, how to care for young etc. and this would adversely alter the whole herd left behind. It used to cost 150 dollars but now it can be up to 1300 dollars for a pound of ivory, so this is not just an animal crisis, but a humanitarian one, as it has been proved that the money goes to criminal networks and terrorists, for example, Al Shabaab who have direct ties with Al Qaedea give £500 a month to promote terrorism in Africa and officials are bribed by poachers and there are even Chinese diplomats who bring it back. In South Africa and Kenya they saw how it was changing tourism and began to be proactive, anti-poaching drones are used to see the poachers and protect the herds. China has crushed thousands of pounds worth of illegal ivory as an example and Jodi encouraged the audience to give time or money to organisations that protect elephants. She suggested World Animal Protection Fund or TUSK, or if you cannot afford this, to send an email to your local MP to tell them how important it is to take a stand against poaching.
The floor was then opened up to questions. When asked whether she was always a writer, she said she had been so since the age of 5 when she wrote The Lobster that was Misunderstood (a book her Mum still has) that she illustrated herself. At University, Jodi had 2 short stories published as an undergraduate and this was when she decided she wanted to be a writer. Her Mum told her this was wonderful, but asked who was going to support her and she was right. She had a series of jobs in 2 years including one on Wall Street (she says this is amazing as she cannot even balance her cheque book), editing business textbooks and a private school creative writing teacher, and she also got married and pregnant, but she was writing all the time. She has spent 23 years writing, but it was only 7 years ago that she could substantially contribute to the family finances.
Her favourite book of her own is Second Glance which she enjoyed researching and highlighting her own countries foray into racial hygiene, plus she got to be a ghost hunter. When asked about editing, she highlighted the time she co-wrote a YA book with her daughter and she revealed that Sammy has no filter. A writer receives a 13 page letter telling them what is wrong with the manuscript (editorial letter) from their editor and when this happened for their joint project, her daughter asked how she had not killed her editor yet - editing is not fun for anyone.
She generates ideas with a series of What If? questions. If there is something she is worried about that keeps her awake at night, this is usually a good idea for a book. She hears her characters talking clearly and has likened her career to successful schizophrenia. The characters come first and then she forms a plot around the question, then she researches. It takes 9 months per book, like a baby, and she enjoys doing research but she has no team or secretary and does everything herself, even tweeting (she reads and responds to everything herself).
There is to be a Between the Lines sequel and Jodi revealed that her daughter pitched the idea for the first book to her when she was 13 and she thought it was a great idea for a YA novel and it was timeless. It took 3 Summers to write, edit and then promote and she feels her daughter is the only person in her family who truly understands what she does. They talked through the book line by line, then typed and sometimes they would say the same thing at the same time and other times they would argue. Jodi learned that her daughters instincts were sharply honed. They have written the sequel and it will be published in June when they will be back to promote it and they are developing it as a Broadway musical (Jodi said it was like a crazy Shakespearean Comedy).
When asked about the My Sisters Keeper movie experience Jodi revealed that the writer has no control once the book is taken for adaptation. She met with the Director before filming and he agreed that the ending would not change and that if it was ever suggested, he would contact her. 2 years later she received an email from a fan who was a casting agent and she told her that they had changed the ending. She flew out to the set, but they threw her off it. She told them that they would lose money as she had such an awesome fan base and they would not be happy and she was right, so she has more creative control now. Change of Heart is being developed into a film for the Film Festival circuit and they are casting now and this time she knows the script is like the book as she co-wrote it.
The negative side of research does not effect her as she has a happy life, lives in a place in the US where people come to holiday all the time and she can leave behind the research when she leaves the office. The research is difficult and does weigh on you for a while and makes you realise how lucky you are.
Her favourite characters are Chris Hart from The Pact, Patrick Ducharme (who she has a crush on), Anna Fitzgerald, Jacob Hunt from House Rules and now, Serenity Jones. She writes in a linear process with a sequential narrative in that order and has only ever written one scene out of order which was in Harvesting the Heart.
Her favourite book written by another author is Gone with the Wind. It made a huge impact on her and made her want to be a writer at 13, and she used to act out the scenes with Rhett and Scarlett, though The Life of Pi also blew her away with the power of fiction and faith and she wished she had written it. Scarlett O'Hara is her favourite fictional character.
When she wrote Change of Heart she was aware of similarities in the plot idea to The Green Mile, so as a nod to Stephen King, she gave a character the nickname Green Mile. She feels it does not matter if a story you think of has a similar plot to another as each writer will not execute it the same.
More often than not, she does not like books that say 'If you like Jodi Picoult, you will like this writer' and feels that the writer will just be writing moral and ethical fiction and this is where any similarity will end. When she wrote in this fiction genre 20 years ago, no-one else was doing it (Dickens did it years earlier).
Jodi had a bookmark of Jamie Fraser from the Diana Gabaldon Outlander series and she is a huge fan. She met her when Jodi was a no-one at a literary festival and Diana could not have been more kind or nice and she is very supportive, though Jodi does not think she could spend 25 years with the same character and feels this is remarkable. There is an Outlander TV series which is not yet available in the UK and she feels it is a visual love letter to Scotland with lots of sex and it is the most faithful reproduction of a book she has ever seen. She knows that the fans remember the lives of the characters and all of it is there. She recommends it to us if ever it becomes available here.
The end of the evening was taken up with a book signing and believe me, they were queuing all around the Town Hall.
#JodiPicoult #leavingtime #DewsburyTownHall #KirkleesEvents #KirkleesLibraries
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