Readers want to devour her. Try to check one of her 12 novels out of your public library. It’s not a matter of whether you’ll be on a waiting list, it’s a matter of how long.

Some writers want to strangle her. The 38-year-old mother of three turns out novels at a rate nearly unrivaled by her peers—an original novel, with a new storyline and new characters, published every nine months.

Other writers want to dismiss her. Her urgent, contemporary moral dilemmas played out in expected yet never predictable plot twists can seem tritely topical—yet her characters are unforgettable and there her books sit on the New York Times best-seller list, week after week, shoulder to shoulder with “The Kite Runner” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”

Ordinary people just want to thank her, for getting their stories right or for helping them feel less alone, whether they’re parents of children with chronic and debilitating illnesses or the dozens and dozens of teenage girls who’ve written to her saying they had been depressed and contemplated suicide, but didn’t want to end up like Emily in “The Pact.”

Jodi Picoult was the guest of honor at a recent benefit for the New Hampshire Writers’ Project, interviewed onstage at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord by well-known Northwood writer Rebecca Rule, on Saturday, Sept. 24. The two will repeat the performance at the more intimate venue of the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire for the New Hampshire Authors Series on Sunday, Oct. 24. Admission is free, but reservations are required (603-862-3041).

Though far from the sell-out crowd that attended a similar NHWP gathering with Exeter’s Dan Brown at the Capitol Center in 2004, the vibe was similar. The interview was followed by a Q&A session and offered frank insight into the writer’s life.

While the Washington Post says, “Jodi Picoult has a way—some reviewers call it downright clairvoyant—of homing in on a moral issue just as it breaks into national debate,” the Yale-educated Picoult says she’s simply a worrier.

As “a mom, a wife, an American,” she says, she starts with “What if?”

“I’m not psychic. I’m just thinking about the same things you are,” she says.

When she was younger and recently married, she looked at relationships, with characters such as a professionally successful but abused wife in “Picture Perfect.” After becoming a mother, she examined the lengths and limits of parental love in “Harvesting the Heart.” As the parent of older children, she explored teen suicide in “The Pact” and sexual abuse in “Salem Falls” and “Perfect Match.”

“I call those my worst-case-scenario years,” she says. In each book, she presents alternating viewpoints so that the truth is always shifting. On the one hand, this creates fully realized three-dimensional characters with rich inner lives. On the other hand, exploring these difficult topics from various angles rarely leads to resolution.

“My job is not to give the answers. My job is to dissect it,” she says.

Though prodigious and commercially successful, Picoult admits to false starts and three books sitting on the shelf, never to be published.

A select core of readers helps keep her on track. “My mom is the benchmark” for the general public, she says. “I have another writer who looks at my chapters and can see things only a writer can. And I have a friend who’s a bartender in New York who can probably imitate my writing better than anyone else and let’s me know when I’m getting lazy. My editor doesn’t see my work until it’s pretty close to done.”

While she says she writes for herself, and that she would write even if there weren’t anyone reading her work, her books have attracted a loyal and ever-increasing fan base. Book tours take her from Australia to Anchorage, Ala., to the Stanly County Public Library in Albemarle, N.C. From these readers and others, she receives about 50 e-mails a day. It takes Picoult about an hour to personally respond to every one. “I look at it this way,” she says. “If you went out of your way, out of all the books on the shelves, to pick mine, wouldn’t it be nice to say thank you?”

Though she’s currently writing a book that won’t come out until 2007, her next published book will be “The Tenth Circle,” due out in March, the story of a father who must come to terms with his lifetime of repressed rage after his daughter’s rape. The book features the protagonist’s graphic novel within the novel, in which a father must pass through hell in order to rescue his kidnapped daughter.

In answer to Rule’s question about how she grows as an artist, Picoult says it’s in setting new challenges for herself. The structure of “The Tenth Circle,” which includes pages of the graphic novel, presented a whole new experience, making it, she says, her favorite book so far. “If I didn’t challenge myself, I would just be Nicholas Sparks.”


Jodi Picoult and Rebecca Rule
at the New Hampshire
Author’s Series
University of New Hampshire Dimond Library
Sunday, Oct. 23 at 2 p.m.
Free, but reservations required. Call 603-862-3041for information.