Jodi Picoult wants to ‘Spark’ more dialogue about reproductive health
Jodi Picoult’s “A Spark of Light” places a teenage girl named Wren inside a hostage situation at a women’s reproductive health services clinic.
The name draws the eye and made me wonder: What aspects of a wren did Picoult wish to convey in her character? The wren is a general term for one of nine species of bird in North America. They sing prettily yet are capable of aggression when their territory is breached.
Turns out I was flapping up the wrong tree.
“I do book events all the time,” says Picoult, whose two dozen books have sold millions of copies. “And there’s a girl who comes to many of the events with a book to sign. And her name is Wren. I always tell her, ‘I’m going to use that one day.’ And she tells me I say that every time. But I think it’s just a beautiful name. And it fit this character.”
So Wren the Picoult fan is about to get the thrill of a lifetime. Wren the teenage character finds herself in a much more difficult predicament.
Wren is inside The Clinic when George Goddard, a gunman, walks in, starts shooting and creates a hostage situation. Wren’s father, Hugh McElroy, is the police hostage negotiator. And Picoult populates the sealed clinic with various characters who arrived there for different reasons. To make things interesting, the author presents the white-knuckled narrative in a reverse-chronological order. The effect is mesmerizing, as Picoult establishes moments in the overarching event before revealing how they came to be.
Picoult traces the narrative framework back to 1987, when she read Charles Baxter’s “First Light,” a story about sibling estrangement told in reverse.
“I felt like my head was going to explode,” says the author, who will be at Palmer Episcopal Church on Saturday. “I knew I wanted to do a book like that one day. I just had to wait for the right topic that would allow me to do it.”
A lot of time would pass for that topic to reveal itself. Five years after Picoult read Baxter’s book she published her first novel, “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” That was in 1992.
The tagline on her website simplifies Picoult’s body of work: “Novels about family, relationships, love and more.” Or maybe it doesn’t. The “more” has expanded in the quarter century since she was first published. Her books gradually found an audience, which grew with each title. Her “Nineteen Minutes” addressed the ripple effect in the aftermath of a school shooting. That was 11 years ago, before such tragedies became a horrific recurrence.
Her previous book, “Small Great Things,” followed an African-American delivery nurse who was ordered by a white-supremacist couple not to touch their newborn. Then the baby died.
Picoult again returns to family and love and more in “A Spark of Light.”
“To me, this book was about going back to an origin,” she says. “Which is why it was the right one for that narrative device. What brought each of these people into the clinic that day? Where does life begin?”
The six-page author note at the end of the novel underscores how fraught and delicate and tenuous the subjects of women’s health and abortions are and will be for the foreseeable future. She cites legislation in Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi that have sought to complicate the process for terminating a pregnancy. “I just felt like a lot of these issues were things that needed more discussion, not less,” Picoult says. “There are a lot of reasons a woman would walk into a clinic like this one. The laws are black and white, but the women who go to these clinics represent a million shades of gray. “There are so many misconceptions about the type of women who have abortions. And the providers are considered heathens. And that all opposition to abortion is religion-based. That’s not always the case.” She spent time speaking with and observing Dr. Willie Parker at a women’s center in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Her book’s Dr. Ward “was probably 90 percent based on Willie Parker, who is the most ardent feminist I’ve ever met. He’s also like this unicorn because he performs these abortions not in spite of his Christianity but because of it. His faith moves him to help women in need, rather than judging them.” Picoult would like to hear more stories and discussions about people like Parker, who don’t play to a stereotype on either side of the issue. Because of her cemented status as bestselling author, she estimates she’s talked to “a zillion” people about “A Spark of Light” and the issues its built around. She thinks arguments about abortion prevention fall on deaf ears. “Seven out of 10 women who have an abortion do so because of financial reasons. So why don’t we look at ways to lower the rate there? Free and accessible birth control seems simple. People are opposed to that, which just puzzles me. Sex education in high schools, with free birth control. How about health care for children born to parents who live below the poverty line? Nobody talks about these things. It’s about defunding Planned Parenthood and slowly chipping away at the clinics so going there becomes a hardship. People say turn it over to the states. Then women become a victim of their ZIP code. And this is being decided by a patriarchal society, no doubt. We need more men to speak up and say that women’s rights matter.” Which may be why Picoult developed Goddard and McElroy with a doppleganger effect at work. Goddard and McElroy are on opposite sides of the law. But they act and react in related ways informed by parental commonalities. To say more would be to reveal too much about how the story is set into motion. But Picoult wanted to avoid having a faceless villain light the fuse on her story. “One point I was trying to get at,” she says, “is how many decisions we make are driven out of love.”