American author Jodi Picoult’s rise to become one of the bestselling female novelists in Britain was helped, in part, by her publisher’s marketing campaign. If you went into a Coffee Republic in London in 2005, you would find small pictures of Picoult’s book covers alongside provocative questions: “What would you do for someone you love? Would you leave? Would you kill?” (Mercy, 1996); “Can you reinvent yourself over a lifetime or are the mistakes you make carried for ever?” (The Tenth Circle, 2006); “Can a parent love too much? Or is too much never enough?” (My Sister’s Keeper, 2004).

There are no such messages dotted around the Canoe Club in Hanover, the restaurant in the New Hampshire college town where I have come to meet Picoult. The decor includes Dartmouth University memorabilia, plus a giant canoe hanging from the ceiling, but as I wait for her to arrive I find myself eyeing the paper covering on the tablecloth, uncapping my pen, and surreptitiously writing on a corner hidden by my plate: “If an author who writes about major issues and terrible things has never experienced any of these things herself, can you trust them?”

“Hi!” says Picoult as she suddenly materialises, grinning and wearing a long blue cardigan, jeans and gold wishbone necklace, her corkscrewing red curls hanging damply on her shoulders. “Nice to meet you!”

She has just returned from the American book tour for her 16th novel, Handle With Care, the story of a middle-class family with two daughters. The youngest has brittle bone disease and her mother decides to sue the obstetrician who delivered the child for wrongful birth. Though motivated by love – the desire to win enough in damages to be able to buy her sick daughter all the specialised equipment and care she needs – she will have to stand up in court and say that she would not have had the baby if she had known about the disease.

The tour was, says Picoult, a rewarding if exhausting experience. “In England readers like books that make them think,” she says, scanning a menu. “In America, that’s still a bit of an uphill battle.”

Picoult is an author who believes in connecting with her readers. That may be because success came after Picoult, 42, had already published 10 books; or because, despite this success, she is often dismissed by reviewers, such as Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, for being too facile in her treatment of serious topics; because she has yet to be nominated for an American book award and, for 20 years, was “ignored” by the creative writing department of Princeton University, her alma mater; because she has to fight the idea that she is too prolific to be taken seriously (she has written a book a year for the past 16 years and has the next one in the bag and one already mapped out for 2011); or simply because she is thankful for her success and wants to share her good fortune.

Each year she tours for one to three months – she has developed tendonitis from the combination of typing, shaking hands, and signing books – and every morning she answers her fan e-mails, an average of 200 a day. She posts videos of herself, and of her family romping at their Vermont summer home on her website, www.jodipicoult.com, which also hosts a conversation group called the Pi-cult. On the surface, that sounds cringingly self-important, except for the fact that her readers, and there are millions, are remarkably cult-like.

“I think people respond to me very personally,” she acknowledges as the waiter hovers nearby. “I think they feel they know me, because of the books.”

But that is odd, I say, because as far as I can tell, her life, which she invariably describes in interviews as “disgustingly perfect”, doesn’t really have much to do with her books. She orders the open face lamb pita and when she’s asked what she wants on the side says, “Fries, of course.” This is the kind of thing the mothers in her books, who always like food, would do but otherwise it’s hard to see the parallels with her characters, who invariably find themselves having to deal with soul-destroying situations such as having a child you can barely hug for fear of breaking them.

Picoult, by contrast, grew up happily on Long Island and is still close to her parents – mother a nursery school teacher, father a securities analyst – and younger brother. She married her college sweetheart, who is now a stay-at-home dad, and has three children aged 17, 15, and 13, all of whom seem very well-adjusted (the oldest just got into Yale). She has donkeys and ducks on her land, which her husband cleared himself. The only issue seems to be some lesbian geese, who sit futilely on their unfertilised eggs, waiting for them to hatch. “It’s very sad,” says Picoult, poking at her fries.

“It’s true, you have to work extra hard to find me in my books,” she says. “At school they tell you to write what you know but it was clear to me I knew nothing. So I decided to write what I was willing to learn. If I put anything in that comes from my life, it is very disguised. In 19 Minutes [2007], for example, I was careful not to use examples of bullying that my children had experienced, though, of course, I could have.” One of the protagonists of that book is a teenage boy who goes on a shooting rampage at his school after being bullied throughout his academic life.

“The one that was probably closest to my experience was Songs of the Humpback Whale,” she continues, referring to her 1992 debut novel. “That was about what it means to grow up and step out of your mother’s shadow. Then maybe the second, which was about postpartum depression. I didn’t actually experience that. But I did have a moment with my first son, who was a hellish baby, when I was pushing a stroller with another mother and I said, ‘Sometimes I just want to leave the baby with my husband and run off to a beach in Mexico and never go back,’ and she said, ‘Oh, me too!’ and I thought, ‘What if someone actually did?’ – and that was the book.”

But, I ask, moving my soup bowl over the question scribbled on the tablecloth, does she not feel as if she is cheating somehow by presuming to know about things such as teen suicide or what would drive a child to mass murder? “No,” she says crisply. “If I were doing it to exploit or inflame people, that would be different but I am doing it to raise awareness of issues I think need to be discussed, and I do a lot of research.”

For her next book, which deals with Asperger’s syndrome and “feeling like you have landed on a foreign planet”, she spoke to 10 children and their parents face to face. She interviewed an additional 40 via e-mail because, she explains, many Asperger’s people are more comfortable at a remove than in person. Still, she says, cutting her pita, “I have been attacked sometimes. Once Glamour magazine gave me a terrible review for Harvesting the Heart [1993] because there is a character in it who is pro-life and they assumed I was too, but I’m not. I just think it’s my responsibility as an author to dramatise both sides of a complicated issue. Now I am researching the Christian right for the 2011 book, which will be about embryo donation and a lesbian couple, and it’s extremely hard for me to listen to people who claim homosexuality is a choice – but that’s part of the process. And then other people write me letters like, ‘I have cystic fibrosis, and you are the only one who can write about it.’ But I am aware of the danger of being pigeonholed as a disease-of-the-week writer.”

Too downbeat? Give it a Hollywood ending

Though most writers dream of sharing their stories with the widest possible audience, such a platform can involve the ultimate Hollywood imposition: a happy ending, writes Cian Traynor. When US newspapers reported that the forthcoming adaptation of Jodi Picoult’s novel My Sister’s Keeper scraps its dramatic ending, outraged readers began a Facebook petition group that drew 1,000 protesters by its second week. And Picoult herself let it be known that director Nick Cassavetes is “changing the message I want to get across”.

The assumption that filmgoers are less tolerant of unhappy or inconclusive endings than readers dates from the Depression, when Hollywood’s projected optimism had Anna Karenina deciding against suicide in 1927’s Love, and Dr Frankenstein and his wife living happily ever after in 1931’s Frankenstein. Over the years this cinematic hunger for closure has led to increasingly far-fetched deviations from source material: the Charlie Kaufman scripted 2002 film Adaptation, about a fictional Charlie Kaufman’s screen treatment of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, uses perversely inaccurate meta-fiction to satirise this tendency. High-brow or low, no novel is immune from the Hollywood improver’s art.

Hannibal
In Hannibal, Thomas Harris’s 1999 follow-up to the bestselling Silence of the Lambs, the story ends with Hannibal Lecter and FBI agent Clarice Starling as a romantic couple on the run together. However, when it came time to develop it for the screen, director Ridley Scott said he “couldn’t take that quantum leap emotionally”, and brought in screenwriter Steve Zaillian to give the book an “exorcising”.

The Count of Monte Cristo
Kevin Reynolds’ 2002 take on Alexandre Dumas’ classic has an unexpectedly cheery ending. While this somewhat undercut the original’s underlying message – that happiness cannot be found through revenge – it received generally favourable reviews.

A Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel about a hypocritical Puritan community was revised by director Roland Joffé in 1995 with Demi Moore starring as the ostracised Hester Prynne. Its happy ending, however, was regarded as absurd even by those who hadn’t read the book.

Watchmen
After 22 years, this “unfilmable” graphic novel was finally brought to the screen this year by director Zack Snyder. Despite assurances that even the most pedantic among its cult following would be happy, the film altered its original ending where a giant squid descends on Manhattan in favour of a finale deemed more sensitive to a post-9/11 New York, conveniently keeping the possibility of a franchise intact.

What Picoult is pigeonholed as is a “commercial” writer, a label she claims to have embraced – “I’d rather reach millions of people than win book awards” – but that clearly irks her because of the implication that, if you are commercial, you necessarily have less literary value. She saws away at her sandwich somewhat more vigorously when the subject comes up. Still, she is sold at Costco, alongside other blockbuster authors such as Stephen King and James Patterson.

She thinks of herself as an “activist writer” and says: “I love the idea that I can change the world one mind at a time.” Personally, I think of her as a genre writer, and the genre is one she has invented, which could be labelled “plane reading for smart women”, or a mystery where the issue is not “who done it?” but “what would you do?” Her stories almost always involve a family, a hot-button issue and, occasionally, a courtroom. To my mind, they have replaced chick lit as the popular fiction of the recession era, now that we have abandoned the throwaway culture of consumption that television-shows-in-book form fed (though some of her books have been made into TV movies and, in June, a film version of My Sister’s Keeper starring Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin will be released).

In any case – full disclosure – I discovered Picoult-the-author in an airport, though I knew Picoult-the-name beforehand. We had both gone to Princeton and had been in the creative writing department, so I was interested in seeing how things had turned out for her. Now I tend to read the books when I fly between Europe and the United States, because I know the stories will be absorbing enough to carry me through eight hours and that as a mother I will get sucked in, even though occasionally resolution occurs via supernatural means and I feel she has taken the easy way out with her narratives.

It is not insignificant that Picoult’s favourite writer is Alice Hoffman, a magical realist, and the book that made her want to write was the epic Gone with the Wind, and also that she is unembarrassed about admitting this. If Picoult is not her characters, they do share certain traits: an unwillingness to take refuge in irony, for one, and an ability to do practical things such as bake. She says she always begins with characters when she begins her books, and she finishes when she can’t stand to think about the characters any more. “They are so whiny, and they make all the wrong decisions. Of course,” she adds, “if they made the right decisions, the books would be very short.”

Picoult has a self-confidence and apparently healthy egotism that could come from success but was probably there before. She describes her writing as “somewhere between a vocation and an avocation”, meaning she treats it like a job but, even if she were to stop publishing, she wouldn’t stop writing. “Don’t you think,” she asks, “that when JD Salinger dies we will find piles of manuscripts in the barn?”

Later, when she tastes the maple syrup ice-cream she has ordered for dessert, she muses, “We should make this,” referring to the fact that her husband had just finished making maple syrup from the trees on their land. It’s all very New England, which makes it interesting that she plays so well in old England, where she has had six number one books in a row.

“I know, I was surprised, too,” she says. “But it’s a very small world, and what can seem like American issues turn out to be issues everywhere. Also, the thing that was so smart that my English publisher realised from the start was that they were selling not a book but an author. I call it the American Idolisation of the publishing world: it’s not enough just to write books, you have to also be available somehow, and have a back story. The difference between my celebrity and real celebrity is I control what I show.”

Later, after the waiter has taken away the coffee mugs and Picoult says she is now going to buy chocolate Easter eggs for her children, I look again at the question on the tablecloth. I have been fed fruit crumble but not an answer. Which was probably the point all along.

‘Handle with Care’ has just been published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton

Vanessa Friedman is the FT’s style editor

...........................................

The Canoe Club
27 South Main Street, Hanover, New Hampshire

Lemonades x2 $4.00
Soup of the day x1 $5.00
Mesclun greens x1 $6.00
Open-faced lamb pita x1 $9.50
Fruit crumble x1 $6.00
Ice-cream x1 $1.50
Coffee x2 $3.50

Total (including tax) $38.34