Jodi Picoult - Think Again Podcast - Popular Fictions/Yours to Tell

Hey there, I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Since the early days of the public internet, Big Think has curated more than 10,000 powerful ideas and shared them through video, text, and social media. The Think Again podcast takes us in a different direction, out of our comfort zone, surprising me and my guests with conversation topics we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss.

I'm very happy to be here today with Jodi Picoult. She's the number one New York Times bestselling author of 23 novels including Leaving Time, The Storyteller, Lone Wolf, and My Sister's Keeper. Jodi's latest novel, Small Great Things, has deep personal resonance for her and has been many years in the making. It deals with racism in America today, both in the explicit form of a white supremacist character and the implicit racism that results from class privilege.

Welcome to Think Again, Jodi.

Jodi Picoult: Thank you so much.

So, I mean, I guess let's start with the elephant in the room, which is that we are two white people here about to talk about racism in America. I sort of wish that we had, um, a person of color with us, Ta-Nehisi Coates or Jalani Cobb, who’s going to be here later in the week to kind of bounce these things off of too. But we will come at it from where we're coming at it from. But um, I wonder if you know, if you want to start with an overview—a brief overview of what the book is about, and then a little bit about why it was important to you to write it.

Jodi Picoult: Yeah, yeah. I'm actually going to flip the order of that. That's perfect.

So, 25 years ago, I really wanted to write about racism. I tend to write about the things that upset me the most, and I had been living in New York City when there was an undercover African-American cop who was shot four times in the back by his white colleagues, even though he was wearing the color of the day, which signified him as an undercover cop. This happened on the subway. It totally upset me, and I started to write a book, and I tried really, really hard, and I failed. It was because I couldn't create an authentic voice. I couldn't create an authentic story.

You know, I really second-guessed myself, saying, as you just brought up, what right do I have as a white woman to write about racism when I've had all the privilege in the world growing up, right? I stepped away from it, and over the years I would question myself, kind of playing devil's advocate. I would say, okay, well wait a second, you know, you write all the time in the voice of people you're not. You write as men, you write as rape victims, you write as Holocaust survivors, as school shooters. You're none of those people either, so what is different about this?

And, you know, it took me a while to realize what is different about this is racism. It's very hard to talk about without offending someone. As a result, many of us choose not to speak about it at all.

Right? So fast forward to 2012, and again I found another news story that captures my attention. It is a nurse, an African-American nurse in Michigan, who has 25 years of Labor and Delivery experience. She helps deliver a baby, and in the aftermath, the father of the baby calls in her supervisor and says, “I don't want her or anyone who looks like her to touch my kid.” He pushes up his sleeve to reveal a swastika tattoo. He was a skinhead. In their infinite wisdom—and I say that in quotes—the hospital put a Post-It note in the baby's file saying, “No African-American personnel to touch this infant.”

The nurse wound up suing. She settled out of court. I hope she got a giant payout, but it made me think, what if I could push the envelope and create a novel around this? What if there was this African-American nurse that this happened to, but she was the only person in the room when something happened to the baby? What if she had to choose between following her supervisor's orders or saving this baby's life? What if, as a result of that, she winds up on trial with a white public defender who, like me, like many of my friends, would never call herself a racist?

And what if I could use those three voices—the African-American nurse, the white public defender, and the white supremacist—to tell the story and to have them all challenge their beliefs about race and privilege and power? It was like this aha moment for me. I suddenly knew I was going to actually be able to finish this book, and the reason was twofold: my intent was different and my audience was different. Right?

I wasn't trying to write a story about racism to tell people of color how hard their lives are. Like you said, I have no right to do that, and that never will be my story to tell. But I was writing because I needed to tell other white people, “Hey, you know, it’s really easy to point to the skinhead and say, ‘Oh, there’s a racist.’ It’s a lot harder to point to yourself and say the same thing.”

And yet, you know, because racism isn’t just about prejudice, it’s also about power and privilege, we are part of the problem as white people even if we’re not talking about it. Not choosing to talk about race is a privilege in and of itself.

Right? I mean, you have a very big and mainstream audience in America, among whom I would imagine there are a lot of white people who might be uncomfortable, as you know, even some of the white people I grew up around are, with Ta-Nehisi Coates's latest book, and any, you know, Black Lives Matter and whatever. And when these things are discussed, just start saying, “Well, that's, you know...” get very defensive.

Totally. And you know, it’s funny, I’ve already done a couple of interviews for this book, and I literally spent a three-hour trip from one venue, one event to another, basically doing personal social justice workshops over email with white men who were upset with some of the things that I had said.

And you know, that’s okay because one of the first things you learn when you start studying racial justice, which is new to me, you know, this is a journey I just started, and God knows I have a long way to go, but we’re all at different points and that’s okay.

And you know, one of the first things you learn is that it is important to talk to your own kind. And just like Ta-Nehisi Coates in his brilliant book makes it very clear that this is intended for people of color, right? You know, I guess what I’m saying is the audience I’m trying to really reach here would be, like you said, those white people who I think really do want to enter this conversation and do want to make the world a better place but don’t have the vocabulary or the wherewithal to know how to start talking about racism.

Yeah, no, I mean, we would want, I guess, though to get to a point where we don’t have to think about, like, being one kind or another, you know, talking to, but we’re so far away from that right now.

That’s part of the problem. And the thing that gets me the most is like, you know, honestly, when I—and I judge myself too, I should say this—that I don’t mean to judge anybody else because I was this person a couple of years ago. But people often, white people, I that I meet say things that they think are the right thing to say but that couldn’t be more wrong.

You know, like, this is in your book. These are like death by a thousand cuts of white friends who are saying things to her like one of my favorite lines in the book is when Ruth narrates and says white people don’t mean half the stupid things that come out of their mouth. You know, and that’s great because it is true.

And honestly, people of color cut us a lot of slack all the time, you know? But I would love to get to a point where people of color and white people can have honest conversations about race. We’re not quite there yet.

And so right now, I think it really is important that if you, if you are white, like I’m white, you know, you get to go out and say to other people who may not have figured this out yet, “Hey, you got to look a little more closely at yourself.”

It took me a while because, you know, I’m half Jewish and I very much identify with the Jewish side of my family. I know the history and I spend a lot of time thinking about what my ancestors in the not-too-distant past went through.

And so in my 20s, I think it was, I was living in DC and I was working at Living Stage, which is a social outreach arm of Arena Stage, and we were doing workshops, um, and the cast were mostly black and Latino. I was sort of in like a peripheral support kind of ambiguous role, and there’d be like workshops with, you know, mostly black kids from DC, and it was, you know, it was uncomfortable, like coming to terms with like, A, what is my role in this situation? Do I even belong here? Do I have anything to say or add?

But also with just racism and the fact that like you can’t help it, you know?

Right, totally, and you know, it’s really — there are a couple things I would say to that. The first is that being put in those situations where you’re not in the majority in a room is so important, and a lot of white people, I don’t think they ever have that opportunity or they don’t go out of their way to make that opportunity.

One of my favorite things to do is to be on tour in South Africa because although there certainly are still a lot of white people in South Africa, when you look around the media there and you look at billboards and posters and magazines, the standard of beauty is very much a black standard of beauty, right?

Which is so cool! I mean, I just always feel, wow, this is very otherworldly to me when I’m down there, and I like it.

Yeah, but by the same token, one of the first times that I was in a space where I was not in the majority was at this racial justice workshop that I went to. And of course I went in there thinking I’m a good person, I’m open-minded, you know, and I left every night in tears.

For me, the most moving parts of the workshop were really hearing stories of situations I will never have to live, right? So, like, there was this one girl who was an Asian-American girl who talked about her love-hate affair with eyeliner and how she was in tears talking about how she couldn’t use it easily on her own features but that was the standard of beauty in which she grew up.

Oh, and there was another young woman who was an African-American woman who talked about how exhausting it is to wake up every day and to have to put a mask on, a metaphorical mask, to be the kind of black person that white people can handle and how tiring that was and how she never was herself.

And like, you know, it was really like light bulbs going off, firecrackers in my head, going, you have never had to feel this. You will never have to feel this. You know, and that was really, for me, a sea change.

I mean, I just turned 50. I literally spent, you know, 47 years of my life not paying a lot of attention to race because I didn’t have to.

One of the other great things I did when I was researching the book was talk to multiple women of color for over a hundred hours of interview tape, because let’s be realistic — I don’t have the right to write the voice of Ruth. I never will be a black woman in America. And if I was going to do it, because of what I was trying to say desperately, I had to do my homework.

And I met with these just wonderful ladies who basically overlooked my ignorance about their own lives and spent all this time telling me about their hopes, and their fears, and their successes, and their failures.

There was this one mom who came in and she had had this baby recently, and she spoke to me and said it was after another unarmed black man was shot by the police. It was the morning after, and she came in all upset and said, “How am I going to protect my son? How do I teach him to grow up and not be black?”

Gotcha. And how do you answer that? You know, how on earth do you answer that?

And it was like a devastating beginning to a conversation. These women, they're the voice of Ruth for me. They read the manuscript, they made changes so that it would sound as authentic as possible given that I was a white woman writing it, you know? And I couldn't have and should not have written the book really without their help.

Yeah, I mean, black people in this country have been explaining for a long time to white people what they’re going through.

You know, this is my favorite thing I’m doing on tour. So I’ve been, I’ve done a bunch of events so far, and at every event, I say to a group of people who are predominantly white, “Raise your hand if you know who Rosa Parks is.” And, you know, everyone raises their hand.

And then I go, “Raise your hand if you know who Lewis Latimer is,” and maybe I get one person to raise their hand, and I’m like, you go, good for you! And then I say, “All the rest of you, that’s your homework. Find out who he is and then ask yourself why your education did not cover that.”

Right? You know, and that’s really important. I didn’t know these things until I started digging. But it is on us; it’s on us to start digging. It’s not up to people of color to explain it to us.

Totally. I mean, the last thing I want to say as, you know, a guilty white liberal who is aware of systemic racism and feels very unhappy about it, especially having grown up completely obsessed with, I mean that aspect of black modern culture, which is early hip-hop and the stuff I was listening, you know, Beat Street, Breakin’, whatever, trying to breakdance myself as a kid, you know, and being like the outsider within my little mostly white private school, you know, it’s troubling to me to think that we are in two completely divided cultures.

And I want, like, I kind of yearn for that connection across the lines, you know? But I read Ta-Nehisi's book and I felt like, okay, this is me. This is us. This is what’s going on with us, and you can’t quite understand, you know?

Right? So I had a really interesting experience with Ta-Nehisi's book because it was another growth experience for me.

So I read this book and I was blown away, and I went out and bought ten copies and gave them out to people who I thought needed to read them. And I was talking to a friend of mine who is a woman of color, and I said that book absolutely wrecked me.

And I said, I really, you know, I mean on Twitter, everyone’s connected, so I’m like I’m going to write to him and I’m going to tell him, you know, that I really love this book. And it was just about then that he was tweeting and saying, “Great, I’m thrilled all these white critics are giving me awards. I do not care.”

And I was like, whoa, whoa, wait! And he said, you know, that's awesome, um, great, but this book was not for you.

And it was really interesting because I went back to my friend and I was like, I mean, I guess I'm not going to write to him now because he doesn’t care if I liked it. And then, and then I thought, you know, but why? You know, as a writer, I would certainly want to know if someone liked my book.

And she broke it all down for me. She goes, “Can I just stop you right there? It’s not about you.” And I was like, oh God, yes! Right, I forgot about that.

And that whole process though of like the sort of the ego getting kind of offended by, like, why would they want to talk to me about this, you know?

And it’s like, yeah, and no, it’s totally not! Right? I was like, no, it’s not about me. And yes, he did an amazing thing. And then I kind of sat back and I sat with that for a second and I thought, okay, no, it’s not all about me.

And two, this really gave me validation because I was in the middle of writing this book and I was like, I was sitting here struggling with the idea that here I am writing about racism. I’m a white woman. I do want to talk to the people who look like me and say, “Wake up a little!” and I’m talking to my own audience.

And here I have someone I very much admire, Ta-Nehisi Coates, saying, “Yes, write to your own audience.” And I was like, okay, I learned that from you. I’m going to do it! You know, and I felt really good about it.

That makes perfect sense, and that actually is a perfect segue. I'm going to, I'm going to just read the last paragraph of something I was just reading by Ta-Nehisi which I think speaks to why it's not only okay but good that you wrote your book. It’s from an Atlantic article called The Black Journalist and The Racial Mountain, and he says,

“I think there are reasons to write beyond placing a thumb in the eye of white liberals who are not our gods and who are not our slaves.”

And then he says, “By the lights of History, the collective white conscience has never needed salve, has made no apologies, and has proven impervious to the import of black literature. It’s almost as though writers should write for themselves, should heed to their own standards, and keep their own conscience instead of fretting over the feelings of those who they cannot change and who they do not control.”

So that’s really interesting.

Jodi Picoult: Yeah, you know, and it’s funny because I agree with that.

This makes me actually think of Lionel Shriver and the controversy going on. I’ve been thinking about that as we’ve been preparing to talk, and you know, honestly, nobody told Lionel Shriver, in my opinion, you can’t write this. You can’t write other. I mean, it's ridiculous to think that anyone would censor writers of really any color and say you must write within your own lines.

I don’t think that’s the job of the writer, and I don’t actually think anyone thinks that’s the job of the writer. And I really believe that what she was railing against, in totally the wrong way, was the idea that we should be held accountable.

If you are going to write other, you need to ask yourself two questions. You need to say, “Why am I doing this? Is it to profit off somebody else’s pain, right? You know, make money off of that and it’s not my story but I’m going to, you know, get some green off it?”

Or is it because there’s something viscerally I need to tell and this is the only way I can do it, is by writing this particular voice?

Right? And if that’s the answer, then you take—you go to step B—which is how can I write a voice that is not mine with empathy and with insight and with compassion, right?

That is really all any author should have to do and should strive for, honestly. And even having done that, if someone wants to come and say, you know what, you got it wrong, then you got to be ready to deal with that.

That's it. If you get into the kitchen, you got to face the heat. And you know what? I will, I have, and I will continue to. And to me that’s part of my message. You know, I’m willing to kind of be—I’m going to be the sacrificial lamb here. If you want to have a problem with something I’ve written, I’m going to take it and I’m going to listen to you and I’m going to learn from it hopefully, or I’m going to explain to you why I did what I did.

But ultimately, one of the things that keeps white people from talking about racism is a paralytic fear of making a mistake, right? And it’s much more important to talk and know that you probably will make a mistake, and then apologize, learn from it, and move forward, than to not say anything at all.

I agree 100%. And speaking of talking about things that one may or may not know anything about, that brings us to the second part of the show where we listen to the surprise video clips.

I say listen because the audience will hear them, but you and I will see them and discuss them. The first one is by C. Nicole Mason, who I believe is a social activist and also a novelist. Let’s see what it is.

“The issue I see within the election right now is that we’re not having the conversations that matter to people and families across the country. We have moved so far away from the bread and butter issues that families want to talk about.

So, we haven’t heard a lot about poverty. We haven’t heard a lot in this election about making sure that we have a strong social safety net, not only for low-income families but for middle-class families who are still fragile or straddling between being financially secure and close to the edge in terms of falling into poverty.

And we’re just not having those conversations. We’re talking about things that matter, but when we talk about building a society where all people have a fair shot, we’re not talking about the issues that will make the difference for them. We don’t talk a lot about white poverty, and I think we should because I think if we talked a lot more about the way poverty impacts different groups, I think we would not see it as an issue that’s out there and doesn’t impact me, or it’s a black issue or a Latino issue, um, we would see it as an issue of lack and people not having the resources that they need to be able to live a quality and a productive life.

What frightens me is that there's not enough moral responsibility for others in our society. And so we can just turn our back. We can say, ‘Hey, that’s not me, that doesn’t impact me,’ or that’s happening to them and not to me and not seeing the connection between us.”

What are you thinking?

Jodi Picoult: What I’m thinking is I wish that my husband and daughter were with me because um, my husband works and is on the board of a local home shelter where I live, and my daughter spent the summer as a social work intern working with these families in poverty.

Okay? And you know what I can tell you is that my book is about a woman who has been skating right below the surface of the white upper middle class for as long as she can, even though she’s black, right?

Um, I’m not. She’s educated. She got her nursing degree at Yale, like, but everything she’s done has—and even living in a white suburb of a diverse town like New Haven, everything she’s done is in the hopes that her son can have what she considers to be the perfect life, which is actually, that's a whole different issue because what a mom might think is perfect might not be what her son would envision to be as perfect.

And one of the issues that comes up in the book is that Edison, who is this young African-American boy who has white friends and has gone to grade schools, is coming up against, oh, it’s okay that you’re my friend, but you’re not dating my sister, that kind of thing, which happens to a lot of, I think, kids in that environment, uh, who are kids of color.

What she’s talking about though that really resonated with me was an intersectionality, and one of the things that when you start to think about racial justice and you start to think about systemic and institutional racism is how you absolutely cannot divorce it from socioeconomics.

Right? It’s literally like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then trying to take the jelly and the peanut butter separate again. There’s always going to be a little of some on the other side.

In the England of a couple generations ago, this was classism. I mean, it still to some extent is, but like, it was a majority white society. But you had the sort of unbridgeable class barriers, you know? And one of the great arguments that I think you often hear from privileged people when they are talking about how clearly we must be in a post-racial society—which is not true, is that you know, well, there are poor white people too.

Well, there are poor white homeless people, you know? So what about them? Well, you know, there are studies that have been done on this, and if you are a homeless white person, you still will get more money in your can than a homeless black person.

Right? And more people on your street will shy away from a homeless black man than they would a homeless white. And if you really want to take it to the mat on that argument, I mean, the statistics are like extreme, you know?

The percentage of black Americans living in poverty is insanely higher than that of white Americans—graduation rates, etc. And I mean, honestly, if you really want to unpack that, you have to go back to slavery and the devastating effects of that on generations of families, you know?

And honestly, when you think about a homeless family that is trying to get its feet back underneath them, you know, their concept of saving is very different than what someone in the middle class is going to have when it comes to savings.

You know, they’re going to be thinking really of living hand to mouth, that if you have extra money, resources, you buy something right away with it because you may never have that money again, right?

You know, and so when you begin to compound that by generations of poverty, which, you know, grew out really of a post-slavery era, all of a sudden it’s exponential.

I mean, you can’t undo the two, and what I do agree with hugely that she says though is this concept that it is everybody’s problem.

I’m also going to be the first one to tell you that we are not talking about things that matter in this election at all.

We can’t, let’s not even begin that!

Um, I don’t even want to talk about the things that are talking about!

Exactly. But I do think that when she says this isn’t just a black problem, I think that really is sort of the entry point that I came into anti-racism with—the idea that when you only hear people of color talking about racism and how it affects them in a way, and this is horrible, I’m the first one to say this, in a way, you just become almost deaf to it.

Sure! You know, it’s a little bit like how honestly like I feel about school shootings. There have been so many that they blend together. That is a horrible, horrible state of affairs, and you know, and the same thing when you hear people who are oppressed complaining about the oppression—sometimes you don’t listen, which is again a horrible state of affairs.

Sometimes it takes that one unexpected voice to speak out that makes you realize, “Wait, what?” and catches your attention. And honestly, the best way that I can describe this, I have my oldest son, he’s gay, and I, you know, after all the rhetoric about why there should be gay rights in this country, what makes people sit up and take notice? When a Republican senator says something, you know?

Because it’s not what you would expect the Republican senator to say. And when he says, “Yeah, we ought to have gay marriage,” all of a sudden everyone goes, “Wait, what? Huh?”

So in a way, I do believe exactly what she says. It is everyone’s problem.

I mean, part of this I think is also America. It’s foundational to America and to some aspect of the American dream, right? We start as a country of pioneers, of rugged individualists. We are not a collectivist society, so ideas of giving a damn about everybody are, to some extent, imported to us via European socialism later, like it’s sort of the labor movements in the 30s, you know?

In a way, it’s like there’s something fundamentally American about being like, damn it, I’m going to take care of my own, and you take care of your own.

And like that’s hard to shake, I think. But it also comes back to that idea of that American dream and something you said earlier about guilt, you know, this white guilt.

And you know, there is this sense that if you decide to think about all of us together instead of just what’s good for me, right, that you are losing something, you have to give something up, right?

And you know, when you are white in America, you hold all the advantages. Who wants to give away the winning card, right?

But there is this very subtle and seismic shift in thinking if you can make yourself understand that if we tackle this together, if we begin to unpack and dismantle racism together, we actually all win, right?

That’s the difference. But you know what, and let’s go there in a different way. My son, who’s 8 years old, almost nine, there’s a homeless woman, maybe she’s 50 something, who stays in the train station near where we live.

And he’s befriended her. He goes to her every time, “Hi, how are you?” He talks to her. And I say hi to her as well, but peripherally because of him, it wouldn’t—probably wouldn’t have happened.

And he asked me the other day, like, “Why can’t we give her $5,000 for Christmas or something? Can we just fix her thing?”

You know? And I had to, like, sit there and take a deep breath and be like, why can I? Why is the answer no? You know? Because the argument of like, well, if we help her, then we help all of them, then we won’t have anything—that doesn’t really feel very satisfying.

Right, right, yeah. And that is—that’s a really hard, again, that’s a really hard thing.

But I’m thinking about Sammy doing her social work internship and saying that, you know, so much of success is not one moment of success, especially when you have been in homelessness—that it’s that the next time when you fall, you fall less deep, and the way that you do that is by having skills and resources that are given to you or taught to you in some capacity, hopefully through an organization like the one that my daughter was working for, so that you can begin to get your own feet under you.

And the next time, it’s not quite as far a fall.

That reminds me, I actually heard Killer Mike, the Atlanta rapper, was on, um, I guess this was an older clip from the Colbert Report when that was still on, and Colbert was, like, speaking for all white people, “What can we do?” you know, sort of thing.

And Killer Mike said, “Volunteer to mentor African American youth and give them some of the—if they don’t have it—give them, share with them some of the skills that you have about, like, applying to college and whatever.”

Now, from a my white guilt perspective, that like smacks of like, no bless obli. I don’t want to, like, I don’t want to like “G,” you know?

I feel bad about like, am I—I'm going to go rescue everybody? But that was what Killer Mike had to say. He was like, “Share some of your white privilege, you know?”

Like, I tend to think that a really good way to kind of get rid of that white guilt is think about how can you, you can’t change it. You’re going to stay white; I hate to tell you, but you’re always going to be white.

So how can you use that in a way that is helpful? And of course, right, like you said, I don’t think it’s a savior thing. I don’t think you’re supposed to ever go in and say, “Let me tell you how to fix your lives,” because let me tell you, communities of color know what they’re doing and they’ve got great leaders on their own.

But what here’s what you do have when you’re white: everybody wants to listen to your opinion, and I don’t know why that is, but people actually care what you have to say.

And you know, there’s this kind of metaphorical microphone that I think about, and if you are able to, as a white person with an audience in any venue—even if it’s a board meeting, you know, and there are just 10 people sitting around the table—if you’re able to tap that metaphorical mic and say, um, excuse me everyone listening, great, and then pass it to somebody whose voice isn’t heard or, you know, be the guy in the conference room who says, “We haven’t heard from so-and-so yet,” right?

Maybe, you know, maybe it is a woman of color in the corner who hasn’t talked yet because people are talking over her. I don’t know, but make sure that other people’s voices are somehow heard.

One of the things that I love about going out on a tour for Small Great Things is that I’ve been telling people, finish this book and then go right back to a bookstore and find a voice of color.

How often do you read an author of color? There are so many incredible authors of color, and honestly, if you really want to know more about what it means to be black in America, do not listen to Jodi Picoult. Listen to someone who’s been living in, you know?

And so the idea that as an author, one of the things I can do with my privilege is steer people to voices that they haven’t heard is really important to me.

That makes sense! Shall we see what the next surprise clip is?

I can't wait!

Okay, nor can I! It is critic A.O. Scott, and the video is titled, Are Comedians More Intellectual Than Politicians?

I feel like if you want to see, you know, anti-intellectualism um on full display you can watch some presidential debates. I mean, you can certainly look at our political discourse and see, well, you know, thought and intellect is not held in the highest value, and uh, that concerns me a lot.

There is, you know, a tradition. Richard Hofstadter wrote a book probably 50 years ago now or more called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, where he identified this strain in politics and civic life of, you know, mistrust of expertise, of suspicion of knowledge or of thought or of irony, or of nuance.

And I think in culture and the arts, there’s a lot of that too. There’s a lot of spoon feeding, there’s a lot that’s just sort of easy, and I think that it’s important to recognize and to reward and encourage opposition to that, which can come in different places.

I mean, I think there are champions of intellect and intelligence out there in the world. A lot of them are comedians.

I mean, I think we do live at a time where, you know, people like Jon Stewart or Larry Wilmore or Chris Rock or Amy Schumer or, uh, Lena Dunham, you know, are out there kind of saying, “Well look, let’s be smart. Let’s think. Let’s like not take things for granted. Let’s not just accept what’s given to [Music] us.”

So I’m actually going to go, I think, in a different direction with this. You’ve said some really interesting things on like from a twist on this topic, right? So, yeah, um, I was hoping you were going to go there.

Yeah, first of all, you, yeah, you, um, used to write for Wonder Woman, so you know the whole like comic books high culture, low culture divide there, you know, in American history.

And then I know you famously kind of got into it with or around Franzen, right? And the fact that Jonathan Franzen’s book was reviewed twice in the New York Times, plus a style piece, okay?

So, I’m coming at this like my background is sort of as a culture snob, like a lit snob, like Nabokov, Shakespeare, whatever. I like made myself read all the dead greats, you know, before any modern writers, but I’m really interested to hear, like, you know, more about your take on that divide kind of in the public industry and in the culture at large.

Absolutely. Well, first of all, let me be on coming off of this. Let me start with comics because it’s interesting you bring them up. You realize, of course that comics are often the leading edge when it comes to social justice, and that we’ve had gay characters and gay marriages in comics and black characters long before we’ve had them in other incarnations of pop culture, which is really cool.

Wonder Woman, case in point! Yes, right? You know, Green Lantern, I mean all of these things, that’s a very interesting, you know, association. But what I immediately started thinking about was of course the divide between literary and commercial fiction, right?

And that is pretty much a marketing tool more than anything else, you know? Traditionally, commercial fiction sells really well and is not well-written. That’s the general belief. And literary fiction is well-written and wins prizes, but nobody gets rich off it.

I would argue that both of those are false. I read everything. I have read lots of literary fiction that is extraordinary, and I’ve also read lots of literary fiction that is naval-gazing and that I don’t think really merits the praise that it gets. Sure, on the other hand, there is some really bad commercial fiction out there.

I am the first person to tell you that! But commercial fiction does something really extraordinary. It reaches people. It reaches the people who aren’t reading Shakespeare and the greats and Aeschylus and, you know, all the traditional high-brow literature, right? The translated Polish TOS that are in the New York Times Book Review. People who are not reading that will go pick up a piece of commercial fiction.

And here’s the other thing. Commercial fiction, if it’s done right and done well, in my opinion, reaches more people but also has the ability to teach more people because you can write a book that is about a very thorny, difficult social justice or social issue and have your reader think you’re telling them a story.

I’m going for, I get these characters, I want to see what happens, there’s going to be a twist, this is going to be awesome, and if you do your job right, they close the book and they’re still thinking about that issue, right?

You know, where you’re not going to go and have a reader probably go and pick up a book like they’re not going to go read the FBI report on school shooters, okay? But I did, and I used that when I wrote 19 Minutes, which is about bullying and school shooters and gun culture in the US, and people who read that book were haunted by it.

Educators still use it when they are teaching to other educators. It’s been used in numerous high schools across the country, and I hear from teachers all the time saying we never have discussions in classes like the ones we have with that book.

I think that is what commercial fiction can do. It is this backdoor entry into the issues that are hard to talk about in reality.

Interesting!

And I really do feel that about this book, about Small Great Things.

So that’s interesting. Well, that’s really interesting that you say that because, and you have a—I know you have a master’s from Harvard in education, so you’ve got an education background, and so you see a storytelling but also a didactic function in commercial fiction.

My world as the classroom, okay? I mean, I actually think I’m still a teacher, right? It’s just a really, really big class, right? And thank God I don’t have to write, you know, grades for all of them, but it really is to me that is why I write.

I write because I need to understand something, and if I can understand it, I can explain it to other people. And so for me, the art of fiction is that it allows a wide swath of people, commercial fiction, it allows people from all different levels of reading and corners of the world to approach a topic that they think is going to be entertainment, right?

And that turns out to be education.

I think what’s interesting, so I think bad commercial fiction, or at least what intellectuals maybe like A.O. Scott think of bad commercial fiction—and he’s certainly watched his share of horrific movies—so the criticism of it, the main criticism is that it is reinforcing the prejudices and the sort of ignorance that people already hold, right?

So you’re saying the good commercial fiction can shift that.

Right? I guess literary writers, you know, I’m thinking of my darlings, you know, Nabokov or, you know, someone like that, like they would probably balk at any kind of like didactic function. They wouldn’t want to be seen as educators.

They’d want their education to be oblique, like they’re problematizing your reality and your way of thinking. I think they want to be seen as chroniclers of The Human Condition and take from it what you will, right?

You know, I, I guess I would like to believe I have a slightly more active role in the process, right? But you know, I think that I think that’s okay. I think he—what A.O. Scott is also saying though is, you know, that you’ve got, first of all, I didn’t know he looked like that!

But you’ve got, you’ve got comedians nowadays who are in a way the most cutting-edge intellectual response we have to some of what’s going on in society.

And I think of Samantha Bee, who is my own personal hero these days. Love her!

And she can get away with saying what we’re all thinking because it’s entertainment.

Well that’s right, and comedians cut through that divide. I mean, there like no one would think of comedians as intellectuals, and so it’s very interesting that they’re assuming that role—a public intellectual.

I mean, and what I’m arguing is we shouldn’t lump all literary fiction as being brilliant and we shouldn’t lump all commercial fiction as being trash because I don’t think that’s the case.

Do you think that the existence of those categories and the kind of marketing machinery that is behind them creates traps for writers that kind of silo them sometimes in one direction or another in terms of the structures of what they’re trying to write?

One hundred percent! Because I can tell you, I still remember the day that I was basically told to choose a path.

Yeah!

They said you can either revise the book so it's more like this, or you can revise the book so it's more like this.

And I just—I mean, I remember distinctly thinking, well, I would write—I know I’m going to write the same book, so I might as well reach more people, you know? And that was the choice that I made.

Interesting!

You know, it probably means I’m going to go out on a limb and say I probably never will win a National Book Award, but so be it, you know? Because I do believe that there are people who are coming to my books, are learning something, and are leaving changed.

And I would like to argue that that is the entire point of fiction in general.

I think that’s right. I agree with that.

And indeed, you may well end up, because of this book, as kind of the therapist to white people trying to overcome racism.

Okay, the reluctant therapist, perhaps the unqualified therapist!

But yeah, it may—it may end up happening.

Jodi Picoult, it has been wonderful talking with you today, and thank you so much for coming on Think Again.

It really has been my pleasure. Thank you!

I truly enjoyed it. And uh, for the audience, the book is Small Great Things, and I urge you to—I urge you—I feel like I can’t say, I feel like I have to say if you’re white—no, but I don’t think that’s true!

Actually, I don’t. I will say that because I mean as a result of our earlier conversation, I now feel I should.

Well, it’s really—it’s interesting you should say that because I’ve heard from a lot of people of color, and what they’re saying is you know what? The best I could hope for, which is this feels authentic, you did your homework, and I’m really touched that you even wanted to have this conversation.

That’s the best and the highest praise I could receive from a person of color.

And I’ll also say that you’ve written what is—I’ve read a bit about the white supremacist movement in America, and you’ve written a very convincing, to me, white supremacist character who is probably interesting to anyone who is not a white supremacist and doesn’t know anything, which we hope is many people, yes?

Right!

Um, thank you so much for coming on!

Oh, thank you! I really appreciate it.

And that wraps up another episode of Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

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