She never expected to be a best-selling author, but 23 books later Jodi Picoult is about to launch her latest great read – and in true form, it will also get people talking.
Small Great Things drops in Australia on October 12 (Allen & Unwin, $32.99) and the following month the much-loved author will be touring Australia promoting the book.
And it’s bound to cause a bit of controversy, as, through its central characters – an African American midwife, a young white extremist father and a female defence lawyer – the book examines racism in America.
“I’d wanted to write about race and racism for a long time,” she says.
“I tried to write a book about it 20 years ago, but I just couldn’t do it.”
The turning point came when she suddenly understood who her audience would be. “I wasn’t writing this book to tell people of colour how hard it is to be a person of colour,” she explains, “because what right do I have to do that? What I was doing was writing to white people to say, ‘Open up your eyes’. For me, the act of writing a book is about struggling through a problem or an issue that I don’t understand.”
Jodi researched the book exhaustively, spending many hours in conversation with a group of African American women.
“I’m not a black woman, I never will be a black woman,” she says, “but I needed to be able to write as close to that voice as was humanly possible and that meant sitting down with a group of women of colour, and they were gracious enough to overlook my ignorance and to tell me about their lives. I didn’t know very much about their lives and they knew way more about what it was like to be white. White culture is pervasive and they’ve lived in it, but we have not immersed ourselves, as white people, in black culture.”
Jodi is taking the conversation on the road, with an international book tour that takes in Australia in November. More information about her tour is here.
Read our full interview with Jodi Picoult, in the November issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly, on sale Thursday, September 29.
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