Bans & Violence: Bonus - The Full Jodi Picoult Interview

Bethanne Patrick: Greetings Missing Pages listeners! I’m your host, writer and literary critic Bethanne Patrick.  If you listened to our episodes about the rise of book banning, you heard about the efforts around the U.S. to censor books on sexual or racial grounds. However, we uncovered that there is a lot more going on than that. And one of the guests that we spoke to has firsthand experience with book banning. New York Times Bestseller Jodi Picoult. Picoult has had her book, 19 Minutes, banned in school boards across 24 states, and was kind enough to join us for an interview. While only some of it made it into our episode, we now present the full Jodi Picoult interview.

Bethanne: Jodi, I have to, after reading one of your op-eds, ask if you can set the scene for us of what it looks like to see a book burn. 

Jodi: Oh, it's really shocking. You know, so you're referring to a prop book that I was watching burn every night in a production  of The Book Thief, which is a musical that I'm co-librettist for and of course, The Book Thief is this beautiful novel by Marcus Zusak, and it's about the Holocaust, and it's about the Nazis, and there's a scene in it when they do burn books that were written by Jews. And You know, my director was so insistent that we were going to literally burn a book because she wanted it to shock people. And, you know, it was, it was completely shocking to see every single night, to see the flames go up and then they would throw it into a bin so that obviously it wouldn't burn down the theater. But. It also was doubly shocking because it happened when I was starting to see an increase in the number of times that my books were being banned in America. And I had this very strange disconnect in my head. You know, here I was, I was supposed to be chronicling history through a theatrical experience. But it felt like we were moving backward, and it felt like we were making the same mistakes all over again. So, yeah, it was, it was really shocking. And we're getting ready to mount the show again in England in a couple of months, and I'm gonna get to watch it every night again. And, and think about the fact that now I know that not only have my books been banned in multiple states, and multiple titles of mine banned. For example, last week I heard about a school in Minnesota. Where they had been given a class set, I think it was 60 copies, by my publisher of Small Great Things. And for years, the book was taught as part of one English teacher's curriculum. And, you know, it's about white privilege, it's about racism in America, and it was taught without incident. And this year, the seniors in the school took all the copies of the book and threw them in a dumpster. Because they said it made them feel guilty. And they didn't feel that that should be part of their education. And so, you know, when I look at something like that, Bethanne, what I see is that my book hasn't changed. The world has changed around it. The country has changed around it. 

Bethanne: I hate that. Although it's very well said. It's very well said. Did you have experience before this with book bans? Have they happened along the way in your career? 

Jodi: Yeah. Absolutely. I think I, I think almost all of my books have been banned at some point, you know, and I've been writing so long that I don't even want to give that number, but I feel like it was isolated incidents. 

Bethanne: Mm hmm. 

Jodi: You know, so I remember My Sister's Keeper was banned years and years ago when it was first published in a couple of school districts, and usually whoever made the challenge, eventually it was overturned. It wasn't, it wasn't removed permanently from, from library shelves or from school shelves. The difference now is the frequency with which these bans are coming in, the fact that the people who are challenging the books have not even read the books and don't have to. They're not expected to read the book before they challenge it. That blows my mind. When I saw some of the, the forms that these parents have to fill out in Florida, where you literally check a box saying, I did not read this book. And that's, that's cool. You could still get a ban. That to me, again, it's a total disconnect in my mind. How could you possibly object to a book that you haven't even read?

So the challenges are not just coming more fast and more furious, but we, we actually know that 11 people in the United States are responsible for 60 percent of the challenges to books, 11 people. 

Bethanne: Now, for our audience, tell us who those 11 people are because I have read that before. Um, but it is, really remarkable because it seems to be these extremely driven personages who will, as you say, go anywhere and do anything to see the books that they object to banned. Who are they?

Jodi: Well, a great number of them are affiliated with a group called Moms for Liberty. Moms for Liberty is a right wing national group that is basically on a mission to ban material in school libraries that they deem inappropriate for children. The real problem with Moms for Liberty is that They, they don't want their kids reading this material, which as I've said many times in the media, that's great, you know, as a parent, your job is to monitor what your kids are reading, but you don't have the right to tell other parents what their children should be reading. And by making these books inaccessible to those kids, you are doing them a great disservice. Many of them say that the book bans are tied to their faith, to their belief that they want to protect children and keep them innocent. And what we're seeing, of course, is the vast majority of books that are challenged are by writers of color and by LGBTQ writers.

They are also calling out almost anything that they consider to have mature content as porn, which is what most of my books apparently fall in as. I, I guess I write porn. That's something that was unknown to me in the 35 years of my career. More importantly, the books that they're citing as porn, from my standpoint, the books I've read, I would say about a third of them don't even have a kiss in the book, which is pretty fascinating.

Jodi: You know, the reason that they're getting traction is because legislation is now starting to be passed in individual states that supports, and I put this in quotes, parental rights, and that enables them to, uh, use these very vague definitions of the law to support their cause when they say a book is damaging to children.

And so what, what's happening as a result of this in places like Florida and places like Texas is that educators are operating in a culture of fear, and they are removing books in some cases. entire libraries full of books because they're afraid of criminal punishment. In Florida, if you are found with a book that has been objected to by the Florida Department of Education, you face being charged with a third degree felony, losing your teaching license and being fined $5,000.

Bethanne:: Jodi, this is a world that when you and I first met, and you know, it's not like it was decades ago, but it still was probably a little over a decade ago. It wasn't something that we could even imagine. So one of the things that you've written is that books help people find common ground and book bands spotlight the differences between us. And so I wanted to have you comment on that in light of what you just said. Because as we know, books do help connect people. They help people communicate, to understand each other, to gain compassion. But these bans, all they do is show us, as you said, that one parent cares only about their child and not about other people's children.

Jodi: Right, you know, it's very easy for them to claim the moral high ground when they're saying they're doing this because they're protecting the kids. You know, to me, first of all, their talking point, their default talking point is always, you want porn in schools? You're a groomer. I can't tell you how many times I've been called a groomer and a pedophile on Twitter. You know, nobody wants porn in schools. There's a reason that, you know, Hustler isn't in school libraries. But porn is very different from a book that has mature content in it that is appropriate for, say, a high school student because it has literary value. That's the difference between porn and a book that, you know, an adult would read, for example.

And there's great literary value in the books that are being pulled from shelves right now. You can childproof your world, but you can't worldproof your child. Right? 

Bethanne: I love that. And I actually want to interject for a second because one of the things that I'm seeing, and I'm sure you agree with this, but I want to make sure we get it on tape, is that they're not just defining porn as, you know, like Hustler, it's all about. sex, and secondary sexual characteristics. They're saying that things that have to do with people's gender identity, sexual orientation, even things that have to do with family decisions about medical care, that that's porn. That's not porn. 

Jodi: No, it's not porn. None of this is porn. That's the whole point. Like, you know, when, when you only watch Fox News and that's what you hear over and over again, you start to believe it. And people who don't even have a stake in the game. Some of the people banning books don't even have kids in the school district, you know, but they're still challenging these books because they are on some kind of righteous crusade to remove this objectionable material, again, in quotes, from the eyes of their, their students.

Now, this is problematic in a lot of ways. First of all, my books have been pulled at the high school level. There is no way that you could tell me that a high school student who has a phone does not know that sex exists. Okay, that's the first thing. Second of all, when you start talking about how you're protecting the kids, what you're really doing is putting them at a disadvantage.

Most of the books that are being pulled, as you're saying, are about marginalized groups, as I said. So kids who somehow feel like they don't fit in for whatever reason, because of systemic racism, or because they are still questioning their gender or their sexuality. How many of us have learned something from a book or found ourself in a book?

That is this quote, objectionable material that's being removed. It's actually resources. It's tools that allow kids to deal with the reality of a very troubling and difficult and thorny world. What they are actually doing by removing these books is taking away the tools to help kids find themselves.

And that is so disturbing to me because, it comes back to controlling the thoughts of a generation. If you only give them a certain amount of information, they grow up believing what their parents did. 

Bethanne: You know something else that I think is really interesting is that we know that kids, even if they're reading a book that maybe is a little too tough for them, they get out of it.

The right thing for them. I've said in interviews before my sixth grade teacher gave me James Baldwin. Now, should I have been reading if Beale street could talk, but she was a very, very smart and savvy woman. And she, she gave it to me and said, now, you know, Let your mom know that you have this and I think my mom looked it over and was a little surprised but thought, you know what, if she doesn't know what's going on or what this sex scene is about, either she's going to ask me or she's just going to pass over it and go on to the next scene that is interesting and that is with with my kids, that's how I dealt with a book. Maybe they were bringing home it. I don't know, a horror novel or something, you know, that had a lot of something that was very sexy or erotic. And I thought, okay, well, I've probably read it already, but also they are going to figure out where to get the information. And it's just exactly like you said, Jodi, any student with a cell phone is able to find out whatever they want to find out.

And so 19 Minutes. Tell us about the plot and why you wrote it, and then let's talk about why people want to ban this book.

Jodi: Well, so 19 Minutes, which is officially being banned as porn in many school districts at this point, I think, I think we're up to, like, twenty 24? Something like that? 24 states, sorry. School districts in 24 states. 

Bethanne: That's a lot of school districts. 

Yeah, it is. We should go back for a second and say we talked, I talked about the Moms for Liberty. The reason that the same books are being banned over and over in different school districts is because they have compiled a binder of objectionable books, which keeps getting larger and larger.

So people who are working with Moms for Liberty or who are part of their tangent groups on the ground. Literally take a binder and then drop it on the desk of a school board and say, we want all of these removed. So 19 Minutes has the dubious distinction of being one of those. 19 Minutes, I wrote years ago, I think it came out in maybe 2007.

But it is about a school shooting and it is in particular about the effects of bullying and how it takes the village not only to raise a child, but also to fail a child. I had, like with all of my books, I did extensive research. I spoke to the police department in Littleton, Colorado about Columbine. I was shown tapes that at the time were not available to the public that showed the shooters in the woods before They went into the school, uh, shooting guns at trees and calling out the names of classmates as targets.

I wound up talking to survivors from Columbine. And then I went to the site of a more recent school shooting, Rocori, in Minnesota, where I, again, was speaking to survivors, particularly this one young man who, there were two kids who were killed in that school shooting, and he was in gym class with one of them when it happened, and best friends with another one.

And so he had some very interesting perspectives on it. So I did a ton of research for this book. And what I could tell you, is that I know, I know this book has not only saved lives of kids who feel marginalized like many school shooters do, but it has saved the lives of students. And I'll tell you a story, when I was on tour for this book, and I went to tons of high schools, and I was in one in New Hampshire, and they had decided, again, talking about the way the world has changed, it was a one book, one school read, so thousands of kids all read 19 Minutes.

And so I gave my talk about the research, you know, and then, I stood up and the principal's on stage with me and he says, does anyone have a question? This one kid raises his hand, he stands up and he goes, well, I don't really have a question, but um, I just wanted to tell you that I was going to bring a gun into school this October and kill people and then I read this book because it was assigned to me and I realized I'm not the only person who feels this way.

So the principal's standing next to me and is white as a sheet, right? And you know, another kid raises their hand and I call on her. It's a little girl who is in a wheelchair. And she says, I don't really have a question either, but I go through my life in the school with everyone not seeing me. Nobody notices me and I was suicidal and I came home and I was crying and my mom was upset and she was trying to, to make me feel better. And I just kept saying I wanted to kill myself. And then I actually read my English homework. Which was the first chapter of 19 Minutes, and that's the reason I'm still alive. So, I mean, boom, back to back, in one school, within 10 minutes. And, and that does not even call into account the thousands of letters I have received over the past decade from kids who've read the book, and who have changed the way that they see the world. So, This is not a book that is gratuitous. This is not a book that is sensationalistic. The reason it is banned, according to Moms For Liberty, is because of one single page that describes a date rape and uses the anatomically correct words for genitals.

Now, it's not, again, gratuitous, it's, it's part of the plot, which is all the different ways that people are bullied. And like I said, it has been banned nationwide in many places. I personally think that there's something seriously wrong with a country that feels that keeping kids safe means banning a book about a school shooting instead of the guns that cause them.

And it really makes me wonder where the priorities of these parents are. 

Bethanne: As a parent yourself, who has supervised your children's reading, where does your empathy end with parents who are concerned about these titles? 

Jodi: When they start telling me how to parent, that's where my empathy ends. As you know, I engage with people on Twitter that I probably shouldn't, I could be using that time to write, but instead I'm always trying to walk the walk here, you know, and I, I do want to have a conversation with people and I have a lot of conservative folks who find their way into my feed and tell me I'm a groomer.

And when I take the time to explain to them, are you aware that my books, 20 of my books were banned in one school district? Are you aware that a number of them don't even have a kiss, but are called porn? And then finally, there was this one woman I remember who, I finally got her to realize that the books that had been banned of mine had never been read by the person who, who challenged them.

And she stopped and she wrote me back and said, Well, that seems ridiculous. And I was like, yeah, you think? Um, you know, but not everyone always has all the information because we tend to get our information in silos and vacuums right now. And that's why when it's possible to reason with someone, I try and I hope that maybe one out of ten times I can make someone step back and stop spouting lies or rhetoric that they've heard to see the reality of the situation. I will also say that the vast majority of people in America do not want books banned. And the reason that it's happening so quickly is because it's always easier to rile people up and to get them angry than it is to coalesce around inclusivity.

Bethanne:  Well, this is really, really important, I think, which is you're, you're talking about someone who realizes, as you just said in that interaction, that it isn't correct. It isn't right to ban something without even taking a look at it. And yet, as you said, coalescing around inclusivity is really difficult. So talk to us about some of the fears you have at this moment. Where we are saying, oh, let's just ban a whole swath of this without actually looking at it, without, with, with just, you know, hearing some talking head say that this is porn. What are your fears that w-, what road are we going down? 

Jodi: Well, before I answer that, I want to tell you about Port St. Lucie, Florida. They banned, uh, there were, I think it was 17 books in one fell swoop, and 19 Minutes was one of them, and it was banned because it was porn. And then they eventually got around to a review process, which can take months and years in some cases, which is really the modus operandi of these organizations, because the longer a book's off the shelf, the better for them.

And they wound up deciding to put back 16 books. The one they did not put back was 19 Minutes. 

Bethanne: Oh come on!

Jodi: But, but wait, it gets better. They decided the reason it really should be banned, it wasn't porn. I was right about that. It wasn't porn. But it was about mature situations and school shootings, and they did not feel that that was something that kids were mature enough to handle.

I will point out that active shooter drills begin at age five in the school district in Port St. Lucie, Florida. So the reason I bring this up is because I would like to believe that reason will prevail, but reason will not prevail because these people want to get rid of these books in any way they can.

They will find a reason if they can. So what is the real, what is the endgame here? Well, we don't have to guess. We know what the endgame is. We saw it in the 1940s. We know what happens when the government and basically people who are given power try to control the thoughts of a nation. And it doesn't end well.

Bethanne: That, I think, is really terrifying and we do know where this is going. And these record book bans, here's, you know, one of my fears this week is that Mad Honey is going to be on the book ban list. Is it already?

Jodi: No, I don't think people clocked it.

Honestly, you know, I mean, there's, there's definitely Once they figure out what Mad Honey's really about, yeah, that's totally going to be bad. No question about that.

Bethanne: So I know when you wrote Sing You Home, one of your children came out to you and that was very powerful at the time. And I, I wonder if writing Mad Honey and collaborating with Jennifer Finney Boylan has galvanized you in a similar way. 

Jodi: I think that, you know, writing Mad Honey for me was something I'd really wanted to talk about for a long time. I didn't want to talk about it without Jenny's voice there too. And, you know, what a joy spot it was to, to work with Jenny. She actually just texted me, \uh, because we're, we're going to be together later today. She goes, I see we're getting the band back together. And, you know, I, the best part of writing that book was making such a good friend. But also, I still very much remember talking to her at the beginning of the process and saying, I am going to ask really stupid stuff sometimes because I don't know the answers and I want to kind of thank you in advance for having the grace to give me responses.

And interestingly, I had the same kind of conversation when I was writing Small Great Things and the author Nick Stone was doing the sensitivity reading for me. And we, we used to joke about it because I would say, I have a stupid white girl question. And then Nick would write me when she was writing a book, I have a stupid black girl question.

And she would ask me about sunburns. You know, like things that just aren't in our range of knowledge. But when you have a close friend, you can ask things that are a little more sensitive. But even asking those questions, and although it's never on the, it's the responsibility should never be on. Um, you know, the person of color or the, the trans person to have to explain it.

You should have to figure that out for yourself. But, you know, there's a difference between making an assumption that's wrong and at least being curious enough to ask a question with respect. And our hope in writing Mad Honey was to look at these big questions about gender that are literally being decided by people on a state house floor with no sensitivity and no understanding of what it is to be a trans person. And instead to give people, if not a handbook, at least a taste of what it might be to walk in the shoes of somebody who has lived that kind of life. Because if you can't talk to someone directly, a book is the next best thing. And that brings us right back to what happens when you pull books off shelves for kids.

Bethanne: You've mentioned social media, from seeing the discourse online and on social media, what is your perception of how it's playing into this widespread banning at this moment?

Jodi: Twitter is a really bad, um, reference point because Twitter is just really bad. You know, and it's funny, I, I have different social media and I use it in different ways. You know, and to that end, Twitter is probably where I am the most political in myself. You know, if you're going to follow me on Twitter, you should know what you're getting.

It's not a tremendous shock that I'm a liberal, but I think that you're right about the fact that it's not just social media, but it's the whole internet age that, that we know things. that are happening in real time. I don't see that as a negative. I actually see that as a positive. Imagine what would have happened if the Nazis were burning books in the 1940s and we all knew about that.

I mean, maybe America would have gotten off its butt and gotten into the war earlier, right? So I think that it's kind of a good thing to know that we're seeing little flare ups, you know, all over the country because it makes people aware of the fact that even as it's not happening in your backyard yet, it might still happen.

And to that end, like, you know, I can't tell you how many times I hear Florida, Texas, but what about Connecticut? What about Minnesota? Are you surprised to hear that my books have been banned there? Because I am. You know, even, honestly, there was a challenge to a bunch of books on Long Island in the library system where I had my first job.

And that was, that was a couple of years ago. And I spoke out, I wrote a letter that was, you know, in the news and read at a town meeting because it was shocking to me, again, that the world had changed so much since I inhabited that spot in it. 

Bethanne: As you mentioned earlier, 19 Minutes was published in 2007. Did you find that book banning actually helped your book sell more? And what do you think of the idea that book banning actually brings more attention to books?

Jodi: So that is actually a fallacy. Okay. Right. And I love this because I get, that's the first thing people say, Oh, your book is banned everyone's going to read it now. And yes, you know what, in my case, Sometimes it helps, but I already have a name and I already have a career. So people who heard Joy Behar talk about The Storyteller when it was banned, a book about the Holocaust that was banned, let's just unpack that irony. But when she mentioned it, I know there were people who watched The View who maybe had never read my books before, who then suddenly got the book and started reading me.

Great, that is wonderful. That's not what I'm aiming for here. That's not the end game. But the vast majority of books that are banned, again, are by LGBTQ and BIPOC authors, and these are authors who do not necessarily have a following, who do not have a name, and for them, removing their books from school shelves, particularly the YA and the middle grade authors, is devastating to their careers.

Devastating. So the opposite actually happens. 

Bethanne: You were already dear to me, but now I am, I'm so, so grateful. 

Jodi: Thank you for that, yeah.

Bethanne: Thank you Jodi

We want to thank Jodi Picoult for joining us on Missing Pages. You can check out her newest book, Mad Honey, co-written with Jennifer Finney Boylan, wherever you get your books.

Bethanne Patrick

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, Produced, mixed, and mastered by Chris Boniello with additional production and editing by Jordan Aaron.

Produced and Hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick.

This episode was produced by Claire McInerny.

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Vannessa Ullman, and Annabella Pena. 

Art by Tom Grillo. 

Original music composed and performed by Hashem Assadullahi, additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate.

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Matt Keeley, and Jodi Picoult.

The views and opinions of guests are their own and do not represent the views of the Missing Pages team or the Podglomerate.

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