Our host Vick Hope is joined by American author, Jodi Picoult. Jodi is the number 1 New York Times bestselling author of 28 novels and short stories and has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Jodi’s new book By Any Other Name tells the story of two women, centuries apart, who are both forced to hide behind another name to make their voices heard.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to see Jodi top five most influential books written by women.
Reading [Gone With the Wind] through the lens of white privilege but being aware of that later on in life and recognising that there are whole sides of that story and voices that weren’t used or told was really eye-opening and shocking – that’s what I really love about books. Books don’t change… but you change everytime you come back to a book. [Rereading] is a really good marker of how you have grown as a person.
As an English major, what fascinated me the most is that when [Karen Blixen] wrote about her own life, she stripped away all of that ‘stuff’ – that artifice. What amazed me was that the more something touched her heart, the more important it was to her personally, the fewer words she used… as a writer that is the most fascinating thing to me, that sometimes words do fail you, that sometimes you cannot describe the emotions you have inside.
Toni Morrison was hired to teach [at my college] the year after I graduated. She came in when I was a senior and was writing this little book called Beloved… she did this reading for the students and I was sitting there – I mean her voice is so magical and lilting, she could read me the phonebook and I’d be delighted! She was weaving magic that day as she was reading from her work in progress – you could literally hear a pin drop in the room. It was almost as if everyone knew that this was going to be something extraordinary.
There’s something about this book that really struck me… it’s about a mother and a child and the lengths that we go to protect our children [which is] a very familiar theme to me. But the idea of a gollum – of creating a monster that’s going to protect you, that monsters can be human, and how men can be beasts – to me, is such a delicate needle to thread. I don’t know that anyone can do it better than Alice.
This book is one of those books that floored me – that I gave everybody for Christmas. It was so incredibly unique in story and there’s a big part of me that kind of believes all stories have been told and we’re just retelling them in different ways – so to come up with something that I felt I’d never seen before was such a feat. On a meta level, as a writer, to read a book about how you leave your mark on the world when you’re cursed by the devil not to, and how art is a way to leave your name behind was just ah – mind-blowing!
