Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jodi Picoult talk about their collaborative novel

Virgin Radio

15 Nov 2022, 07:34

The two writers have teamed up for the first time.

Jodi Picoult is famous for tackling sensitive, controversial subjects in her fiction. Over 25 novels, she has written about abortion, school shootings and euthanasia.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a former professor at University College Cork and an author known for her non-fiction, including her 2003 memoir about her transition, She’s Not There.

The two writers have now teamed up to write Mad Honey, a murder mystery whereupon a young woman, Lily, is killed. As the story unfolds we learn that Lily's boyfriend Asher is the prime suspect, forcing his mother Olivia to question whether her son could have inherited his father’s abusive behaviour. Later we learn that one of the characters is transgender.

"Isn't it nice to just have someone on the journey with you, right?" says Jodi. "We had a blast writing this book together. Jenny is absolutely the right person to work on this story with me. I think we both brought really unique things to it, about what it means to be a woman. And because of that, I think we created something that's really never been done before..."

"This book came out of a dream," adds Jennifer. "I was in New York City about five years ago. I'd woken up from a dream in which I'd been co authoring a book with Jody Picoult, who at least then I had never met and did not know. And I got up and I thought, 'well, that was very specific'. Anyway, I went on Twitter, I tweeted out 'I just dreamed I was co authoring a book with at Jody Picoult', who happened to be online at that moment. She saw the tweet and sent me a DM that said, 'What was this book about?' And that's how this happened!"

Jodi has written collaboratively with another writer before; "I actually wrote two young adult novels with my daughter [Samantha Van Leer]. When we started she was 13, we finished when she was 16, and then wrote a sequel when she was at university. The difference, of course, between writing with my daughter and writing with Jenny is that I couldn't tell Jenny to go to her room..."

And yet, while Jennifer hasn't, she says that collaborating with Jodi has resulted in her being able to tell a story hugely important to her.

"I'm a transgender woman," she says, "and there's a trans element in this story, which comes as a as a surprise at some point in the book. And so what I'm hoping for is that some of Jodi's readers who may be encountering this issue for the first time, who think that they know about this issue and who think that they have an informed opinion, are suddenly thinking, 'Oh, here's a character that I already know and that I already love, and it turns out that, without even knowing it, this book has opened my heart to someone who I might have dismissed or not been open to before this time...' That's one of the great things that I think stories can do, to challenge you..."

Jodi adds, "We're I'm getting hundreds of emails from people in America who have already read the book, and that is exactly what my readers are saying. That this book educated them and opened up their minds and their hearts and it really made them think about things in a way they'd never thought before. Which honestly is exactly why we write novels..."

Mad Honey is available to buy now.

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