Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
In Jodi Picoult's new novel, The Tenth Circle, ninth-grade girls are doing a lot more than playing spin the bottle. In fact, the book's unchaperoned party has the kind of sexual servicing that sounds more suited to the Rat Pack at its most debauched in Vegas than a high school gathering in Maine.
"The truth is the truth," says Picoult, 39. To investigate contemporary teen sexuality, she interviewed nurses, rape crisis counselors and her children's babysitters. She and her husband, who is a part-time antiques dealer and stay-at-home dad, have two boys, 14 and 12, and a daughter, 10.
Picoult is glad she wrote The Tenth Circle, even if the published results have made her "the talk of Hanover, New Hampshire," her hometown.
Everyone in the novel is flawed, including a 14-year-old rape victim and her parents. And there's plenty of suffering: suicide, adultery, drugs and suppressed childhood trauma, elements that Picoult says have not touched her. She describes herself as unusually lucky.
Her parents are still married, her childhood on Long Island was wonderful, and she adores her brother. A writer since she learned to read, she attended Princeton, where she studied writing under Mary Morris.
At one point, she concedes, she called up her mother and unsuccessfully tried to uncover some family dysfunction.
Picoult has known some trouble in her life. Her oldest son has had nearly a dozen operations on a benign tumor in his ear. She drew on the experience of having a frequently hospitalized child for My Sister's Keeper, her most celebrated novel. It searingly captures how having a sick child can profoundly warp family dynamics. The mother in the book is a polarizing figure for many readers.
"With a chronically ill child, there is only so much you can do for your other kids," Picoult says.
A disciplined writer and avid researcher, Picoult already has written her 2007 novel, 19 Minutes, about a middle school shooting, and is at work on her 2008 title. The focus will be on the death penalty and organ donation. It takes her exactly nine months to research and write a book.
Picoult says she answers every e-mail her readers send. "It's my job," she says. (Her website is www.jodipicoult.com.)
As for her motivation? Picoult says her novels are an outgrowth of her own curiosity. She's always asking herself "what if" questions. The trigger can be anything: a newspaper article clipped by her mother, a disagreement with her husband, a controversy. After the initial idea, "the characters start popping up like mushrooms. And then they take the story away!"
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
