Jodi Picoult was born and raised -happily-on Long
Island...something that she believed at first was a
detriment to a girl who wanted to be a writer. "I had such
an uneventful childhood that when I was taking writing
classes at college, I called home and asked my mother if
maybe there might have been a little incest or domestic
abuse on the side that she'd forgotten about," Picoult
recalls. "It took me a while to realize that I already did
have something to write about - that solid core of family,
and the knotty tangle of relationships, which I keep coming
back to in my books."
Picoult studied creative writing with Mary Morris at
Princeton, and had two short stories published in Seventeen
magazine while still a student. "The first time the editor
called me to say she wanted to pay me for something I'd
written," Picoult says, "I immediately called my mom and
said, 'I'm going to be a writer!' 'That's great,' she
said. 'Who's going to support you?'" Realism - and a
profound desire to be able to pay the rent - led Picoult to
a series of different jobs following her graduation: as a
technical writer for a Wall Street brokerage firm, as a
copywriter at an ad agency, as an editor at a textbook
publisher, and as an 8th grade English teacher - before
entering Harvard to pursue a master's in education. She
married Tim Van Leer, whom she had known at Princeton, and
it was while she was pregnant with her first child that she
wrote her first novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale .
Picoult says, "I found out it was going to be published
just before my son was born, and I had this completely
idealistic vision of him sitting at my feet, cooing, while
I continued to write books. Needless to say, it didn't
quite work out that way." Her struggle to balance
motherhood and her own career formed, in part, the basis
for her second novel, Harvesting the Heart. For a few
years, she was either delivering a book or a baby. Now,
she's happy to be prolific solely in her writing...and
admits wholeheartedly that she moonlights as a writer, but
she's really a mom. "It took me a while to find the
balance," Picoult says, "but I'm a better mother because I
have my writing...and I'm a better writer because of the
experiences I've had as a parent that continually remind me
how far we are willing to go for the people we love the
most."
She and Tim and their three children live in Hanover, New
Hampshire with a dog, a rabbit, two Jersey calves, and the
occasional Holstein.