Author Jodi Picoult, a self-proclaimed ‘Swiftie over 50,’ has a lot in common with the pop star | Canada Voices

Jodi Picoult is a Swiftie.

In fact, The Globe and Mail spoke to her on the same Thursday in November as night one of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour stop in Toronto – and Picoult, visiting the city on her book tour for her new novel, By Any Other Name, had tickets.

While she jokingly calls herself one of the “Swifties over 50,” Picoult and Swift have a surprising amount in common. For starters, they’re both bestselling artists – Picoult, for her part, has sold more than 40 million copies of the 29 novels she’s written so far – and you need to reach for superlatives when discussing the magnitude of their success.

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They also share a love of hiding Easter eggs in their text: In By Any Other Name, for example, Picoult littered her pages with snippets of Shakespearean verse, a rather sly thing to do when you’re making a fictional case that the Bard was actually, in part at least, a Jewish woman named Emilia Bassano.

“Emilia is the original tortured poet,” says Picoult, nodding a reference to Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. “The book was really written by the time Tortured Poets came out, but I will say that when I listened to that album, I literally created an entire playlist of Taylor Swift songs, mostly from that album, that explain the entire book.”

For example, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived is William Shakespeare, who in Picoult’s hands is a failed writer who uses the talents of people who cannot publish under their own name to make his. LOML, which spells out “loss of my life,” is about Emilia and her star-crossed affair with the Earl of Southampton, the aristocrat to whom the real Shakespeare dedicated several works, including the rather spicy Venus and Adonis, and which Picoult shapes as the lone glimmer of true love in the life of a woman who was forced into sex work as a teenager, and who later endured an abusive marriage. Nothing New, from Red (Taylor’s Version), is interpreted in this lens as “about what it’s like to be the 13-year-old mistress of the Lord Chamberlain knowing, ‘I’m not going to be the fresh, shiny thing forever,’ ” says Picoult. So Long, London works on several levels, not least a geographical one.

“I don’t know if Taylor has ever read my books – one can only hope! But when I talk about By Any Other Name, to me it’s my anthem to girl power,” she says. “It is about how women have been elided from history, for more than 400 years, and how we continue in small acts of resistance.”

Picoult, for her part, says Swift is not just a songwriter, but a poet like Emilia Bassano – who, by the way, is in the historical record as the first English woman to ever publish a book of poetry.

The Globe chatted with Picoult about gender discrimination in publishing, her fears for America’s future and why By Any Other Name is the book she believes she was born to write.

Why this story, and why now?

I keep saying this is the book that I was meant to write, and I really do believe that. This one is about gender discrimination in theatre and publishing, and that is something that I still deal with daily. Even with my success and luck, I am still being pigeonholed. I am very often called a “chick-lit writer.” If I write chick-lit, it’s terrible chick-lit because it’s not light and fluffy.

Or I’ve been called a women’s fiction writer. Meanwhile, 48 per cent of my fan mail comes from men. Women’s fiction just means women write it, not that women read it. We expect female readers to read both male and female authors, but male readers are only supposed to read men. What’s up with that? It’s stupid.

That is ultimately what By Any Other Name is about. Have we made strides as women in 400 years? Yes, we have. But do we have parity and equality yet? Absolutely not.

I would argue that misogyny has just gone underground, or wears a different face.

In America, it’s pretty damn overt. The Supreme Court has never been in the position in America of taking rights away. They always grant rights. And the first time they went backward is the Dobbs decision, and that is just the beginning of a long line of horrors that we will experience in the next four years.

I keep saying I don’t live in America any more, I’m living in Germany in 1933. I did so much research because of the libretto I did for The Book Thief musical, and I can’t even begin to tell you what the parallels are. It’s not just the playbook that Hitler used to rise to power, but the fomenting, sort of morass of society that was hungry for that message. That’s exactly where we are in America, where it’s easier to blame anyone but yourself.

As a writer, what do you feel like your responsibility, or response even, to this is?

I think art becomes even more important than ever in a time of authoritarianism because it allows people an escape, but it also provides a moral compass for the people who have willingly abandoned it. I have made a career of writing about morally grey areas, and you can damn well be sure I’m going to keep doing that for the next four years.

Melina’s story [Picoult weaves in a plot set in the present day about a young woman who can only get a play staged by pretending it’s written by a man named ‘Mel’] requires no suspension of disbelief.

When I was on tour in America, I had one Broadway actress who is very famous, and has been very upfront with mental-health struggles that she’s had in the industry, write to me. She said, “You said things out loud in this book that I have only ever said to my therapist.” Once you get a reputation for speaking the truth in the Broadway community – it’s a very tiny community – as a woman you become “difficult,” and people don’t want to work with you because you’re not playing by the rules.

When I was on my book tour, I had so many regional producers and stage managers and women in the industry who would come up to me in the photo line and say the same thing. That is the secret that nobody talks about, that this is a business where men are running it, dominating it and not just making the decisions about what makes it to Broadway, but through what they’re cultivating that people think are worthy of going to Broadway.

When it comes to your experiences in the publishing industry, you talked about being pigeonholed. Has it manifested itself in other ways?

First of all, let’s look at the structure of publishing: There are so many female editors, which is awesome, but the people who run the publishing conglomerates are men. The other thing that happens is that you get male authors who write what should be considered a work of “women’s fiction” – because it’s family-centred or it’s about a woman choosing between two guys – and instead of being called women’s fiction, and having a fluffy pink cover, they are called Great American Novelists. As if it is incongruous to have both a heart and a penis.

Right now, romance and romantasy are two of the strongest categories in publishing …

They’re literally keeping the whole industry afloat, but they’re demeaned. I have so many friends who write romance. Do you have any idea how hard that is? There are tropes and there are structures to the genre, and you’re given so many parameters to stay within but you have to create a new story every time you do it. And yet, romance authors are told that they don’t know how to write. Again, because that’s considered a “female” category, it is not as worthy as, for example, thriller, which is considered a male category. There’s this constant demeaning not only of what women write, but what women read.

This interview has been edited and condensed.