Who is jodi picoults husband

Updated: GMT, 2 April When bestselling author Jodi Picoult found herself researching the topic of gay rights, a controversial issue in her native United States, the subject matter really hit home when her own son Kyle came out. Here she reveals what her hopes are for him and other homosexual teenagers. My first crush was on a boy named Kal Raustiala when I was an eight-year-old in second grade. He had shaggy, leonine hair, a pet iguana and a climbing frame in his basement. And when I was with him, I never wanted to leave.

It just sort of happened, in the way that love often does: naturally, instinctually, and wholeheartedly. After college, I had a friend who, like me, was naturally, instinctually and wholeheartedly attracted to boys.

His name was Jeff. My roommate and I spent many Friday nights with Jeff and his partner Darryl, catching the latest movies and dissecting them over dinner afterwards. Jeff was funny, smart and a technological whiz. In fact, the least interesting thing about him was that he happened to be gay. Gay rights is not something most of us think about — because most of us happen to have been born straight at no point before falling hard for Kal did I actively choose to be attracted to the opposite sex.

Only five out of 50 US states [plus Washington DC] conduct same-sex marriages, and only a handful recognise its legality. Those opposed to gay rights often say that they have nothing against the individuals themselves — just their desire to redefine marriage as something other than a partnership between a man and a woman. Meanwhile, same-sex couples and their friends and families argue that they deserve the same rights as heterosexual couples.

The result is a country bitterly divided along the fault line of a single contentious issue. People are always afraid of the unknown — and banding together against the Thing That Is Different From Us is a time-honoured tradition for rallying the masses. How did you hear about her?

Saying no. I get at least five requests a day to be somewhere - a school, a book club, a literary festival, a workshop or seminar. Parenting, I hope. Doing readings. I make very tasty Linzer tortes and broccoli soup. Ski - the chair lift terrifies me. Find a crashed computer file. And my husband tells me I should never go into the field of recycling. Jump out of a plane. I was in college, and my old boyfriend dared me. It was incredibly beautiful.

Ouidad Climate Control for my hair. Although I suppose if I was on a deserted island, I could use mashed bananas. My kids, my husband, my dogs. Also because lucky me I married a guy who looks like Robert Redford! Send my kids to college and make sure they have enough money to get on their feet in the world.

Make sure my parents never have to worry about retirement. Buy a lake house in New Hampshire, which costs more than a million, so scratch that, actually… And give a good chunk to charities. Also, people who want to know if I need a proofreader, an extra editor etc.

At first, my mind went toward the Holocaust — I would have loved to prevent that by challenging Hitler. God, no. And Mary Morris, who made me a better technical writer and taught me to challenge myself. Hard question, because so many of them have awful lives!

I would have to pick Sara Fitzgerald, though. Jake, my middle son, was six when he was diagnosed with cholesteatoma in his ear — a benign tumor that can grow into your brain and kill you.

The way to get rid of it will leave a child permanently deaf. It was the right choice because in the middle of ten surgeries in three years, we learned Jake has tumors in both ears there are less than ten kids in America who do.

For many years after he was tumor-free he was profoundly deaf in his left ear and wore a hearing aid; after a reconstructive surgery last year he now can hear out of both ears. Ross Wakeman — and the ghost hunters I worked with doing research. A string walks into a bar and orders a drink. Reading for joy is reading for joy, period. And above all else — model it yourself! We have library nights, sometimes — no TV, just all of us crashed out on couches with our books. Absolutely not. The Inventory: Jodi Picoult ».

Stop laughing. I don't know why it takes me the same amount of time to deliver either a book or a baby, but there you have it. Sometimes the amount of research vs. Often, I work on more than one book at once. I may be touring for Perfect Match , for example, while editing Second Glance , and writing a new book. It's like windows on a computer - several are open at once.

My mom and my agent. I take their comments and incorporate them into the next draft… and do a hefty edit. And another… and another…. Usually, a what-if question: what if a boy left standing after a botched suicide pact was accused of murder? What if a little girl developed an imaginary friend who turned out to be God? What if an attorney didn't think that the legal system was quite good enough for her own child? I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head.

Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it. For Mercy , I researched Scottish clans without having a clue why this was going to be important to the book. It was only after I learned about them that I realized I was writing a novel about the loyalty we bear to people we love. Sometimes ideas change in the middle. The Pact was not a page-turner when I conceived it.

I was going to write a character driven book about the female survivor of a suicide pact, and I went to the local police chief to do some preliminary research. Sometimes I write books because other people make the suggestion: Plain Truth came about when my mother said I ought to explore the reclusive Amish. That happened with My Sister's Keeper - information I learned while researching Second Glance so fascinating to me that I stuck it into its own file and turned it into a story all its own.

At this point, I have several folks on call for me during a book - a few lawyers, a couple of psychiatrists, some doctors, a pathologist, a DNA scientist, a handful of detectives.

When I start researching, I read everything I can about a topic. Some things are harder to find out about than others - getting the head of launch operations at NASA to fit me into his schedule, for example; or making a series of connections that landed me in the home of an Amish farmer for a week. For Vanishing Acts, I spent time in a hardcore Arizona jail, and met with both detention officers and inmates learning, among other things, how to make my own zip gun and the recipe for crystal meth ; and went to the Hopi reservation to attend their private katsina dances.

For The Tenth Circle , I trekked to the Alaskan tundra to visit a remote Eskimo village and to follow a dogsled race on a snowmobile — in January, when it was degrees Fahrenheit.

For Lone Wolf , I spent time with a man who lived in the wild with a wolf pack for a year — and got to meet some other wolves he has in captivity. For The Storyteller , I spoke with the real-life head of the department of justice division that tracks down Nazi war criminals.

For Leaving Time , I spent time in Botswana with elephant researchers, at an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee, and with Chip Coffey — a wonderful psychic! For A Spark of Light , I shadowed an abortion provider, observed multiple procedures, and interviewed women who had terminated a pregnancy…as well as those who were pro-life.

Amazingly, through the Internet. After posting a query on a Lancaster County message board, I got a response from a lovely Mennonite woman, with whom I struck up a research relationship. After many email queries, she suggested I come visit the area and volunteered to find me some Amish friends to stay with. I was there for a week, milking at AM and participating in the morning Bible study, as well as helping out with the cooking of meals.

I quickly learned that the Amish aren't the one-dimensional characters they're made out to be - like us, there are good people and bad people, tolerant people and intolerant people, lenient people and more exacting people.

Just because we grow up taught to live our lives differently doesn't necessarily mean our way is better. Then I begged to be taken to the execution chamber — the Death House, as it used to be called in Arizona. It was while I was examining their gas chamber Arizona uses both gas and lethal injection that the warden approached me to ask me again who I was, and why I was writing a book about this.

We started talking about the last execution in Arizona; and at some point she mentioned she was a practicing Catholic. The most jarring moments in my research trip? And talking to the warden in the death house, when I was having trouble juggling notebooks and papers, and leaned against the closest surface to take notes more easily…only to realize I was sprawled across the lethal injection gurney.

These are referred to as the Gnostic gospels — part and parcel of a religious movement that was denounced as heresy by Orthodox Christianity in the middle of the second century. Gnosis means knowledge in Greek — and the basis for their beliefs is that if you want to know God, you have to know yourself.

Above all else, the Gnostics said, ask questions. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. She and I wrote the songs she composes the music, I wrote the lyrics. I really thought I was pretty brilliant, creating a character like Luke Warren, who studies wolves by living with them.

At that point, it became my mission to meet him. Thankfully Shaun Ellis was more than happy to meet me, to introduce me to the multitude of captive packs he now works with in Devon, England, and to share his expertise. Everything Luke says - and everything I learned - comes directly from Shaun's life, and a good number of Luke's tight scrapes are borrowed from Shaun's actual experiences in the Rockies living with a wild pack.

The ones that really stay with me are the time he went hunting with the pack in winter, and the alpha directed the wolves to suck on icicles. He had thought maybe the other wolves were becoming dehydrated sitting in the snow waiting to make the kill…but it didn't seem right to him.

Then he realized that the alpha had planned for wind direction so that the prey couldn't smell them lying in wait; that the alpha had set up the ambush perfectly, but that due to the cold weather, the prey would be able to see the breath of the wolves in the hollow where they were hiding. By getting the pack to suck on the icicles like lollipops, she prevented that.

The second story Shaun told me that affected me deeply was a time that his wolf brother suddenly went ballistic, snapping at him and backing him into a hollowed out tree. Shaun was terrified and sure the wolf was going to kill him, although up till this point the wolf had been very accepting of his presence - and that he had assured his own death by forgetting he was still with wild animals. After about three hours of snapping and snarling, the wolf suddenly went placid again and let Shaun out from the tree.

That was when Shaun noticed the scat and the claw marks of a grizzly. The wolf hadn't been trying to kill him -- it had been saving his life. When I went to Devon, Shaun had just had surgery and couldn't enter the pens because the wolves would have ripped off his bandage and licked the wound clean -- so instead, I had to meet his wolves with a fence between us.

Unlike normal visitors, though, I was brought through the first fence there are two and got close enough for the wolves to get used to my scent and to rub up against my hands. They can sense your heart rate going up and a tester wolf will turn around and nip through a fence, so you still have to be pretty careful and calm! I also got to feed the wolves by lobbing rabbits to them; and yes, Shaun taught me how to howl. It was pretty remarkable to learn the song - and it really IS that, a song.

I played the alpha, my son was the beta, and my publicist the numbers wolf. We each had a particular "part" in the harmony, and when we all began to howl our individual parts together, all of a sudden a plaintive howl rose from the six individual packs a short distance away -- each of them giving their location in response to the one we had offered them.

It felt like we were having a conversation. In it, Mr. Wiesenthal recounts a moment when, as a concentration camp prisoner, he was brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi, who wanted to confess to and be forgiven by a Jew.

I met with several Holocaust survivors, who told me their stories. Some of those details went into the fictional history of my character, Minka. It was humbling and horrifying to realize that the stories they recounted were non-fiction.

Some of the moments these brave men and women told me will stay with me forever: such as Bernie, who pried a mezuzah from his door frame as the Nazis dragged him from his home, and held it curled in his fist throughout the entire war — so that it took two years to straighten his fingers after liberation.

Or how his mother promised him that he would not be shot in the head, only the chest — can you imagine making that promise to your child?! Or Gerda — who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and who survived a mile march in January — because, she told me, her father had told her to wear her ski boots when she was taken from home. Or Mania, whose mastery of the German language saved her life multiple times during the war, when she was picked to work in office jobs instead of in hard labor; and who told me of Herr Baker, her German boss at one factory, who called the young Jewish women who were assigned to him Meine Kinder my children and who saved his workers from being selected by the Nazis during a concentration camp roundup.

At Bergen Belsen, she slept in a barrack with people and contracted typhoid — and would have died, if the British had not come then to liberate them. Lest you wonder why this topic is still important, even after nearly 70 years — I will leave you with a story he told me. Years ago, after extensive work, his department finally was ready to question an 85 year old man who had been a Nazi guard and who was now living in Ohio. When you think about blockbuster best-sellers, genres like mystery, crime and romance typically come to mind.

Ethical or moral fiction? Not so much. Marcell Jankovsky Pundit. Why did Jodi Picoult write small great things? Jodi Picoult's new novel " Small Great Things " tells the story of an African American labor and delivery nurse and the racism surrounding her care of a white supremacist couple's newborn son.

Cordula Nuevo Pundit. What is Jodi Picoult best selling book? Ilyas Grothusen Pundit. What should I read if I like Jodi Picoult?

What Doesn't Kill You. By Laura E. Blood Orange. By Drusilla Campbell. The Drowning Season. By Alice Hoffman. A Road Through the Mountains.