Bestselling, award-winning author Jodi Picoult‘s newest novel, Sing You Home, features two women, Zoe and Vanessa, who fall in love and sue to gain custody of the embryos from Zoe’s previous marriage to a man name Max. Picoult is known for taking on hot topics – one of her more popular novels is My Sister’s Keeper, the story of a 13-year-old girl who sues her parents for medical emancipation when she’s expected to donate one of her kidneys to her sister-and this time around Picoult takes on gay rights, the Christian Right and reproductive science.
We spoke with Picoult about her inspiration for the novel and how readers have responded so far.
AfterEllen.com: In Sing You Home you tackle gay rights, reproductive science and the Christian Right. What inspired you to write about these subjects?
Jodi Picoult: The idea began with gay rights. To me that is the last civil right that we have not granted in America and I think it’s an enormous embarrassment. I wanted to address the issue with people who would rather pretend it’s not an issue or people who are vocally opposed to gay rights without thinking about what it is that gay people want when they want to get married and have a family. I was thinking about it from a theoretical standpoint, a civil rights standpoint, but in the middle of writing [the book] my oldest son came out.
AE: That’s interesting.
JP: It was great. I could have told you that he was gay when he was three years old. I was so happy for him and so proud of him and this book took on a very personal meaning for me. Kyle’s in college now and when he decides that he wants to get married and start a family I would like the world to be a little gentler and a little kinder. I would like the process to be a little easier for him.
AE: Both before and after your son’s coming out, did you feel pressure to “do right” by the LGBT community? Or even the Christian Right community, which is also represented here?
JP: Any time you put on the mouthpiece of somebody that you’re not, there’s a professional responsibility to get it right. I did a great deal of research in both of those arenas. To start with, I met with several lesbian couples who were more than willing and happy to open up their lives and their struggles to me, which is incredibly kind because unlike asking questions like, “What do you do at work?” I was asking questions like, “What’s your sex life like?” That’s not something I usually ask my research subjects.
But people want to know and that’s what I needed to hear in order to come at the story the right way. I was really lucky to have some very generous women who were willing to talk with me. One of the things that I learned, of the women that I spoke to, was that about half of them were like Vanessa, who knew very young that they were attracted to women and had predominantly same-sex relationships, and then the other half were like Zoe. [The women like Zoe] had been in loving, committed relationships with a man but then had something in their past where they’d been attracted to a woman or even just fell in love with a woman after being in a relationship with a man. I wanted to represent that as well.
I dovetailed this with the story of embryo adoptions because many times I write about points where science has outstripped the law and this is one of those points. We have so many reproductive issues that are not legislated. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no standard. Everything differs from state to state and case to case. To address the struggle to have a family as a lesbian couple by dragging in the question of who has the right to an embryo set it up for a terrific battle that allowed me to [also] drag in the Christian Right, who I thought would probably be the most vocal opponents.
AE: How did you research that perspective?
JP: I went to Focus on the Family. I have to say I give them credit for even talking to me because I told them what I was [writing] about. I said it’s really important that I get your point of view right. I spoke with a woman who recently left the organization, Melissa Fryrear. She was one of the people who use to speak at the Love Won Out conferences. I had a six-hour conversation with her about her life and how she came to realize that she was “not a lesbian woman,” although she had been in a relationship for years, but that she was “gay-identified.” That’s the way they put it. You’re never gay. She [said that she] could change because she has been born again. And now she is, as she says, a heterosexual woman. She doesn’t even like to call herself a former gay person because she feels that she was ever anything less than a heterosexual woman. I said things to her like, “Have you slept with a man?” and she said, “Oh my gracious, no, because I’m not married and that would be against the Bible.”
AE: You use that line in the book.
JP: I had this vision of her running for the hills on her wedding night. She has the language down. It’s not the “who,” it’s the “do,” and like I said, you’re never gay, you’re gay-identified. You’re not a lesbian, you have a “lesbian problem.” They almost can’t conceptualize in language a happy gay person. They assume that everyone gay must be suffering. They say that they don’t want to change everyone, just the people who want help. They also admit, if you push them, that when you go to these conferences you don’t get a stamp on your forehead and suddenly you’re not gay. Really deciding not to be gay is a matter of not acting on a natural inclination.
AE: In the book, Max’s family and pastor consider homosexuality an addiction.
JP: Exactly. They see it like alcoholism: You might still want to drink but you’re not going to because you know it’s not good for you. That’s their purgative. What I had trouble with was when she was throwing the Bible at me and pulling up the same old lines about where the Bible talks about homosexuality being a sin or being wrong. My problem with it, of course, is if you deconstruct the Bible and are willing to look at it like a text none of that holds true. The real problem that I had was that her logic was so circular. When I used the Bible to pin her down and would say, “Well, if the Bible is a sex manual, why are we not stoning to death people who commit adultery or who get divorced?”
There are all of these crazy things in the Bible that no one pays attention to and they are just picking and choosing the bits of text that they think supports their argument. In many cases they’re working with a translation. The word “homosexual” doesn’t even belong in the Bible because it didn’t exist. You can’t call it is the word of God. It’s a translation.
AE: How would Fryrear respond to that point?
JP: She always had an answer. The one that stopped me dead in my tracks, though, was during a conversation when she was talking about how they don’t want to crusade and change people who don’t want to be changed. I said, “If that’s true then why do you have such a strong political arm?” Her answer was that Christians are being silenced and that if everyone else can have a voice why can’t Christians, which is an argument you hear a lot from the Christian Right. I said, “Do you ever worry that your message is getting distorted? That maybe you feel that it’s not the ‘who,’ it’s the ‘do,’ but that sometimes people use the Bible to support acts of violence and hate crimes against gay people?” She burst into tears and said, “Thank goodness that never happened.”
AE: No!
JP: I almost fell off my chair. I couldn’t speak for a minute. I said, “Do you know who Matthew Shepard is?” I gave her a list of 10 other people off the top of my head who have been victims of hate crimes because they’re gay. She couldn’t even answer. She just said, “I don’t know what to say about any of that.” There’s this utter denial. This was one of the hardest interviews I have ever done in my 20 years. I will say, in all fairness, I really applaud the fact that she wanted to talk to me and that she was one hundred percent honest. She provided me with a working understanding of where that point of view is coming from. I thought that was really important.
AE: The book is told from multiple points of view. Did you associate with one more than the other?
JP: I did not associate with Max. I had a hard time writing him because he had to be likable, but he’s a little bit of a buffoon. I don’t think he’s evil. In the end he proves himself. But he was hard for me to write because I’m really not that person. I really liked Zoe. I liked her voice and her pain, the struggle she was going through. Probably the most fun character was Vanessa. She knows what she wants. She’s tough and funny. I enjoyed her voice. It was also fun to write the sessions with Lucy, she was a great character.
AE: Who do you imagine reading this book and what do you hope they get out of it?
JP: I know people who are gay or are supportive of gay rights will read this book, which I love. There’s not a lot of lesbian literature out there. We rarely see a three-dimensional lesbian character whose gayness is not necessarily the most interesting thing about her. I’m delighted to be able to write that character. I also think it’s important that I’m not a lesbian. Although there are terrific lesbian writers out there, so many of them, for me as a straight woman saying, “Wake up and pay attention,” sometimes that shout is heard more because you’re not inside the community.
I think the audience might be a little different because they are not expecting that story from me. The readers I want for this book are the people in the middle of Nebraska who tell you, “I don’t know any gay people” and “I don’t think gay people should be able to get married or have babies. It’s an abomination.” That’s who I want reading the book. Do I know whether they’ll read it? No, I don’t.
AE: Have any of your fans challenged you about the subject?
JP: I have had emails from people who’ve criticized the book even though they haven’t read it, because of the subject matter. I tend to write back, “I really hope you read this book because your point of view is in there but so is another point of view and it’s one you may not have heard before.” I can’t tell you they’re going to change their minds, but I can tell you they’re going to walk away feeling like they understand what it’s like, a little bit better, to be in Zoe’s shoes.
AE: You’re getting emails from people who haven’t read the book yet?
JP: My favorite e-mail came from a woman after an event I did in Toronto, which is a gay-friendly city. I was talking about this book and how excited I was. She came home and wrote me an e-mail that said, “I’ve read all of your books, but I cannot read this one and I cannot condone the fact that you wrote it. Homosexuality is a sin. It says so in the Bible and I’m really upset that you’ve chosen to do this.” I wrote her back and said, “Thank you for telling me your point of view. I really hope that you’ll read the book and make a decision. Maybe you’ll hear a different point of view for the first time, but your feelings will be represented too.” She writes me back and says, “Well the thing is, I was in a same-sex relationship and then I found Jesus and became born again. My husband knows all about my past. The real problem I have with your book is I think it would be like being an ex-smoker in a room full of smokers. It might just hit too close to home.”
AE: Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.
JP: Even better is that’s not the only letter I’ve gotten like that. I was just sitting thinking, “Oh, we’re so messed up. We need to advance this understanding that it’s not a curse to be gay and it’s not a problem that you have to deal with or suffer through. It’s who you are. Period.” And it’s not, in 99 percent of the cases, even the most interesting thing about the person.
AE: Have received any positive responses?
JP: Oh my god, I’ve received so many positive responses. Really great ones from people who’ve had advanced readership. Many people who are gay and lesbian have written to me and said, “I’ve been waiting for this book my whole life.” For me that is such an honor. I would say overwhelmingly that what people are saying is that they are relating deeply to the characters, which is all I want them to do. I do anticipate backlash, I know it’s going to happen, because there are a lot [of people] in this country who will judge the book without having read it. That’s OK, too, because that means I wrote about the right issue.
AE: What was your editor or agent’s response when you told them about the book?
JP: They were so excited. The great thing about my editor and agent is no one ever says to me, “You can’t write about that.” Not only did I walk in and say, “I’m writing this controversial book about gay rights.” I also said, “By the way, you’re going to be packaging it with a CD of original music.” I’m sure they were like, “What?” But they were really on board 100 percent.
In fact, I have another good story. There is a group called Premiere Collectibles. They are a website that sells autographed books. One of the events that I’m doing is a literary salon in New York. It’s a webcast. People who can’t come to the interview can watch online and then if they want to they can go to this website and buy a book. Well, the company said that they would like to donate $2 for every book that’s sold to a cause of Jodi’s choice. I said, “That’s great. I pick the Trevor Project.” All of the sudden they call back my publicist and say, “We are happy to cut Jodi a check and have her make the donation, but we can’t put that on our website because a lot of our clients are Evangelical Christians and we think that it would offend them.” My publicist said, “I can tell you right now we’re not going to be partnering with you. And I can tell you even more that you’re going to be sorry because Jodi has strong opinions, she’s vocal and she has a big following.”
He told me what happened and I went on Twitter – I said, “Boycott this company”-and by the end of the day [Premiere Collectibles] had received so many emails to their customer service department from my fans that they called back my publicists and said, “We’ve had a change of heart – we are happy to partner up with the Trevor Project.”
AE: One last question: Did your son like the book?
JP: He loved it. He’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever encountered. I love the fact that he is so happy and comfortable in his own skin. I love that he is in a supportive community at Yale. I worry as a mom he’s going to step outside that academic bubble and have someone say, “You’re a faggot.” That would break any mom’s heart. I know it’s going to happen. He knows it’s going to happen.
I am so proud to do whatever I can in my profession to change even a few minds because that’s how you change the world. You don’t do it all at once. You do it one mind at a time. There are going to be readers who boycott this book because of the subject matter, but there are going to be a lot more readers who pick it up and who maybe for the first time rethink their opinions and maybe are not so quick to judge the next time they encounter someone who is gay or lesbian or transgendered who really want the same things out of life that they do.
Sing You Home is available March 1.
