An author with a pen game strong enough to reduce people to tears, Jodi Picoult has quite an extensive and well-loved body of work.
She’s written nearly 30 books, selling around 40 million copies, with fan favourites such as My Sister’s Keeper, Mad Honey, and Wish You Were There flying off the shelves.
Picoult writes across a diverse scope of genres, from thriller to romance to ghost stories, and her latest work steps into the world of historical fiction.
By Any Other Name details the intertwining narrative of the woman many believe was the real playwright behind the work of William Shakespeare alongside a contemporary story of a New York author suffering the same fate of being silenced.
Picoult joined Jack Tame for a chat about how this new story came to be, her love of Shakespeare, and the meticulous research she puts into the narratives she creates.
"To me this is really a book about how women have been written out of history by the men who were writing it."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from Newstalks edby.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
You're a jactaim on Newstalgs EDB. Jody Picot is an
author with a pen game strong enough to induce real tears,
which you will know if you have ever read My
Sister's Keeper or seen the movie adaptation starring Cameron Diaz.
But Jody has written almost thirty books now she has
sold about forty million copies of her works forty million.
(00:59):
Of course, she writes across a diverse range of different genres,
from thrillers to romance novels to ghost stories, and her
latest book, By any Other Name is a step into
historical fiction of sorts, with intertwining narratives between two women,
both past and present. Jody Picot is with us this morning, Calder,
(01:21):
good morning.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Well, thank you, Sam, to you.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It is great to be speaking with you, and congratulations
on By any Other Name. It is a story of
two fascinating women in two different eras who have some
experiences that could be defined as being shared and some
unique experiences as well. But perhaps you could start off
by explaining to our audience who is Amelia Bassano?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Sure so, Amelia Bassano is a real life historical figure
who was a female writer in the fifteen hundred sixteen hundreds.
She was the first published female poet in all of
England when she was in her late forties. However, it
(02:05):
is my belief, for many reasons, that she was actually
writing many years before that, and in fact paid someone
for the use of their name so that her work
could be shown in front of the public, because as
a female playwright, you could not have your work in
front of the public back then in Elizabethan times. And
I think the guy she paid for the use of
(02:25):
his name was a little man named William Shakespeare.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
I mean, that is just so tantalizing as a storyline
kind of thread, Right, How did you come across her
in the first place.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
So I actually was an English major and I absolutely
loved Shakespeare. Maybe for five seconds in a seminar we
had a professor said, you know, there's a question about
whether Shakespeare wrote all his plays, and I laughed it off.
And then a few years ago I was reading an
article in the Atlantic by a woman named Elizabeth Winkler,
in which she said that Shakespeare had two daughters and
(03:01):
he never taught either of them to read or write. Now,
the reason I fell in love with Shakespeare was because
of the proto feminist characters like Portia and Beatrice and
Rosalind and Kate right, And I thought, oh, no, no, no,
there is no way that the guy who created those
three dimensional women wouldn't have taught his own daughters how
to read or write. I just didn't buy it. And
you know, lots of candidates have been posed as potential
(03:23):
authors of the Shakespearean plays, but I had never heard
of the one that this woman, Elizabeth Winkler, suggested, and
that was Amelia Bassano. And I started to do this
deep dive into her life. And the thing about Shakespeare's
life is that we know a lot about him, none
of which shows that he's actually a playwright. You know,
But for years academics have kind of twisted themselves up
(03:47):
in knots to explain away things that don't make sense
in his life. And Emilia's life fit very seamlessly into
all of those gaps. And because of that, I thought
it was certainly worth looking at. I mean, to me,
this is really a book about how women have been
written out of history by the men who were writing it,
and about how women's voices have been overlooked and silenced,
(04:09):
and are still being silenced today in many places. So
in a way, it's a very weird thing to have
written a book that takes place half the time in Elizabethan, England.
That is probably the most timely novel I ever written.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
It is certainly timely, even through your own experience, which
we will get to in a moment. So you said
you were a Shakespeare fan. Was that kind of was
it you fall in love immediately or was it something
whereby once you kind of engage and was able and
were able to unwrap the language and the storyline, arcs
and the incredible depth of some of those characters at
the very least that you.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Really I mean, certainly, I you know, I think my
favorite play is actually Romeo and Juliet, very pedantic, but
the first one I read, and I'm still you know,
I'm happily married, and I've been still waiting for a
guy to come up and just speak in the son
and naturally is it.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Too much to ask, Jody? Is it too much to ask? Right?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
But you know, I love that play for so many reasons.
And then as I began to study more of the plays,
and really I fell in love, like I said, with
the language, but also with these female characters who were
just so richly drawn, because that was not a norm
of the time. And maybe that's because it was a
woman writing them, you know, so, I mean certainly I
(05:20):
then also I think I had a tendency in college
to canonize Shakespeare. We talk a lot about Shakespeare almost
in mythological terms. You know, someone who wrote thirty eight
plays while he had had two full time jobs. He
was a producer and an actor. He was apparently the
only play right in all of Elizabeth in England who
didn't collaborate, you know, which makes zero sense, you know,
(05:43):
but that's not really that's not really the story. That's
what's been created around him to create to make him
the bard. What do we know about you know, Shakespeare?
Literally We know that he was a businessman above all else.
We know that he evaded taxes twice. We know that
he had restraining orders taken out against him by colleagues.
We know that when there was a famine he bought
(06:04):
up all the grain in Stratford and jacked up the
price for his neighbors. He was a lovely We know
that he never left the country, although he wrote about
places like Denmark and Italy and Egypt with details that
weren't available in guide books. We know he never played
an instrument, but there are more references to musical knowledge
in the Shakespeare plays than any other body of literature.
(06:25):
We know he wasn't university educated, but when he died
he didn't own a single book of his own. And
when he also he had no praise from any other playwrights,
which is also very strange for someone who was the
best known name of the time. What we don't know
about him that he wrote a single word attributed to him.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
It's so delicious. Just as a prospect, did you find
then that after this proceeds, compared to how you first
engage with Shakespeare, do you think least of the man?
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Oh? Yeah, wayless, you know, But also more importantly, I
think more of Amelia. Yeah right, So Amelia, like, let's
look at her life in counterpoint. So she is born
to an Italian family, and her family is incredibly talented musically.
They are found by Henry the eighth and they're brought
over to England as the recorder consort to the King
(07:17):
and then to Queen she's Jewish, but she has to
hide her faith because you couldn't be Jewish at the
time in England. At seven, her dad dies and she's
given as award to this countess, and it's the best
situation for her because she winds up getting this amazing
legal and classical education. When the countess gets remarried and
she's twelve years old, she winds up living with the
countess's brother for a summer, the same summer that he
(07:39):
as ambassador to Denmark, went to go visit the King
and Queen there, and you know characters that happen to
be named in Hamlet, although again Shakespeare never went to Denmark.
The next year, she becomes the mistress at age thirteen
to the Lord Chamberlain of England and for ten years
she's with him. He's fifty six years old, huge age difference,
(08:00):
but he's in charge of all theater in England. So
through him, she is going to see every play that
crosses his desk, to meet all the playwrights, all the producers,
all the theater owners. She's going to be immersed in
that world. When she gets pregnant at twenty three, he
marries her off to her wastrel of a cousin, because
you couldn't have a pregnant mistress living in your house
when you were married. And this guy is a terrible man,
(08:24):
he's our cousin. He blows through all the money that
the Lord Chamberlain has settled on her to keep her
safe for years, and she winds up at twenty three
with a kid, a husband she hates, and she has
to somehow make a living. And then we don't know
what happens until we see that book of poetry that
she publishes in sixteen eleven. But there are decades between them,
which leads to believe you know, she was writing under
(08:46):
someone else's name.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, I'm sure that everyone asks you about this, but
you are famed for the depths of your research and
your novel. So, just to remind our listeners, and this
is only a short selection, you have lived briefly with
the Amish, traveled to Botswana, you have been to prison,
you've observed cardio surgery. So what kind of research was
involved in by any other name?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
So I wound up, first of all, finding all the
historical primary sources that I could find about Amelia, which
are not many. Most of her life we know about
because of a diary of this astrologer slash hack doctor
that she went to when she was having all these miscarriages.
And he kept the amazing diaries in which he talks
(09:31):
about what she said to him, and also how he
tried to get her to sleep with him and she
said no anyway. And so this diary is in the
Ashmolean now, and in it, you know, all everything I
just told you about her life is all in that diary.
I also wound up speaking to multiple academics, a lot
of female Shakespeare scholars. In particular. I talked to the
(09:52):
head historian at the Globe Theater. I had this amazing
document that was someone God blessed them put digitized every
single day of Queen Elizabeth the First's reign, so I
knew what happened single day. So when I read about
a joust, it happened on that day. And when I
tell you after it was on a mission. He was
(10:13):
on a mission, so I was able to really reference
it historically. There's also an incredible map called the August
Map that another wonderful author, Deborah Harkness, put me onto,
and it allows you to overlay Elizabethan England on top
of modern England, so you can see exactly where all
the places were that I was writing about. So I
was kind of juggling all of this Elizabethan stuff, you know,
(10:35):
in my head as I was writing Amelia.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Yeah, that's extraordinary. How amazing to have that, you know,
those kind of resources. I suppose it's given the nature
of the subject, you're fortunate to be able to benefit
from some of those things. Like I mentioned, as you mentioned,
women's voices are still being silenced in certain spaces. I
think it's just over a year now since a number
of your books were removed from schools after a public
(11:01):
campaign by advocacy groups who said they were inappropriate for
young readers. What the might of that whole experience.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
I have become a very vocal advocate to fight book banning.
It is endemic in my country. It has only gotten worse.
My own books were banned well over forty times last
year alone in Iowa. Nineteen Minutes is the most banned
book in Iowa. Last week, state of Utah actually passed
(11:30):
a law that removes thirteen novels from bookshelves completely, which
is a straight out crazy band. I mean, it's a
very slippery slope, and it's very dangerous because you know,
when it's legitimate for a parent to decide what they
want their child to read, it is not legitimate for
that parent to make decisions about everybody else's child. And
(11:51):
of course it is a very slippery, slippery slope. We've
seen challenges increase ninety two percent in public libraries. We
have seen laws that are being passed to punish publishers
that send books directly to schools. And we've also seen
change some progress in that there are multiple lawsuits that
(12:11):
have been enacted against in Iowa and against people in Florida.
School districts in Florida that have enacted bands publishers and
writers are banding together to sue these school districts to
kind of raise awareness and to get these very poorly
worded laws overturned because now we have our educators living
in a culture of fear. But you know, to bring
it again back to by any other name, I think
(12:33):
that's what makes this so timely. We are in America,
We're watching women's reproductive rights being stripped away, and we
are still living in a time where people are making
decisions about what kind of stories should be told, and
who should be the people who tell them? That is
exactly what Elizabeth Thinninglan was.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Like, Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, just honestly just absurd.
To view it from the outside, it feels like the
real time erosion of civilization or something. I know that
sounds grandiose, but it feels like that.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Well, you know. The funny thing was, I very distinctly
remember writing a scene in this book in which a
Puritan was on an overturned great in front of one
of the theaters, and Elizabeth in England and this again
was lifted right out of history and was complaining about
the moral depravity of theater and how it took people
away from God and how all of these theaters needed
(13:22):
to be shut down. And I was reading, you know,
I'm writing this, and I'm reading what I'm writing, and
I was like, oh my gosh, these are the book banners.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, it's just.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
The same thing over and over again, this idea of
considered to be mature content and morally depraved. You know,
what they're calling morally depraved is actually the kind of
information that kids get to use to make sense of
a very difficult world that gives them a sense of
place and allows them to explore worlds and people they
(13:54):
don't know in a safe space. I mean, books create empathy.
Book bands, you know, destroy it.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
I see the Black Lives Mate a sign behind you.
So how are you feeling?
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Well?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Speaking of Shakespeare and uppose, how are you feeling about
the next hundred days?
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Well, I feel a lot better than it was a
few weeks ago. Yeah, you know, it's been really interesting again.
I feel like this book, to me, feels so perfectly
placed because we are in We're at a crossroads in America.
I feel like we're literally standing here and in one
direction we have the threat of a national abortion pan
(14:30):
and on the other direction, we have the chance, a
very real chance. I think of having our first female
president of color, our first female president, and she happens
to be one of color. And you know, I'm kind
of like sitting here going, Okay, America, your move which
way you're gonna go? Yeah? You know, can I come
to New Zealand? Look?
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Please? We would be delighted to have you, absolutely delighted. Yeah,
thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on by
any other name. I know listeners are just so excited
to get into it. And we do hope that we
see you in New Zealand sometime soon.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
You too. I love it there. It's such a great country.
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Thanks Jody, that is Jody Picot. Her new book is
by any other name. All the details, of course, we're
up on the news Talks.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
He'd be website for more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame.
Listen live to news Talks he'd be from nine am Saturday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from Newstalks edby.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
You're a jactaim on Newstalgs EDB. Jody Picot is an
author with a pen game strong enough to induce real tears,
which you will know if you have ever read My
Sister's Keeper or seen the movie adaptation starring Cameron Diaz.
But Jody has written almost thirty books now she has
sold about forty million copies of her works forty million.
(00:59):
Of course, she writes across a diverse range of different genres,
from thrillers to romance novels to ghost stories, and her
latest book, By any Other Name is a step into
historical fiction of sorts, with intertwining narratives between two women,
both past and present. Jody Picot is with us this morning, Calder,
(01:21):
good morning.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Well, thank you, Sam, to you.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It is great to be speaking with you, and congratulations
on By any Other Name. It is a story of
two fascinating women in two different eras who have some
experiences that could be defined as being shared and some
unique experiences as well. But perhaps you could start off
by explaining to our audience who is Amelia Bassano?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Sure so, Amelia Bassano is a real life historical figure
who was a female writer in the fifteen hundred sixteen hundreds.
She was the first published female poet in all of
England when she was in her late forties. However, it
(02:05):
is my belief, for many reasons, that she was actually
writing many years before that, and in fact paid someone
for the use of their name so that her work
could be shown in front of the public, because as
a female playwright, you could not have your work in
front of the public back then in Elizabethan times. And
I think the guy she paid for the use of
(02:25):
his name was a little man named William Shakespeare.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
I mean, that is just so tantalizing as a storyline
kind of thread, Right, How did you come across her
in the first place.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
So I actually was an English major and I absolutely
loved Shakespeare. Maybe for five seconds in a seminar we
had a professor said, you know, there's a question about
whether Shakespeare wrote all his plays, and I laughed it off.
And then a few years ago I was reading an
article in the Atlantic by a woman named Elizabeth Winkler,
in which she said that Shakespeare had two daughters and
(03:01):
he never taught either of them to read or write. Now,
the reason I fell in love with Shakespeare was because
of the proto feminist characters like Portia and Beatrice and
Rosalind and Kate right, And I thought, oh, no, no, no,
there is no way that the guy who created those
three dimensional women wouldn't have taught his own daughters how
to read or write. I just didn't buy it. And
you know, lots of candidates have been posed as potential
(03:23):
authors of the Shakespearean plays, but I had never heard
of the one that this woman, Elizabeth Winkler, suggested, and
that was Amelia Bassano. And I started to do this
deep dive into her life. And the thing about Shakespeare's
life is that we know a lot about him, none
of which shows that he's actually a playwright. You know,
But for years academics have kind of twisted themselves up
(03:47):
in knots to explain away things that don't make sense
in his life. And Emilia's life fit very seamlessly into
all of those gaps. And because of that, I thought
it was certainly worth looking at. I mean, to me,
this is really a book about how women have been
written out of history by the men who were writing it,
and about how women's voices have been overlooked and silenced,
(04:09):
and are still being silenced today in many places. So
in a way, it's a very weird thing to have
written a book that takes place half the time in Elizabethan, England.
That is probably the most timely novel I ever written.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
It is certainly timely, even through your own experience, which
we will get to in a moment. So you said
you were a Shakespeare fan. Was that kind of was
it you fall in love immediately or was it something
whereby once you kind of engage and was able and
were able to unwrap the language and the storyline, arcs
and the incredible depth of some of those characters at
the very least that you.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Really I mean, certainly, I you know, I think my
favorite play is actually Romeo and Juliet, very pedantic, but
the first one I read, and I'm still you know,
I'm happily married, and I've been still waiting for a
guy to come up and just speak in the son
and naturally is it.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Too much to ask, Jody? Is it too much to ask? Right?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
But you know, I love that play for so many reasons.
And then as I began to study more of the plays,
and really I fell in love, like I said, with
the language, but also with these female characters who were
just so richly drawn, because that was not a norm
of the time. And maybe that's because it was a
woman writing them, you know, so, I mean certainly I
(05:20):
then also I think I had a tendency in college
to canonize Shakespeare. We talk a lot about Shakespeare almost
in mythological terms. You know, someone who wrote thirty eight
plays while he had had two full time jobs. He
was a producer and an actor. He was apparently the
only play right in all of Elizabeth in England who
didn't collaborate, you know, which makes zero sense, you know,
(05:43):
but that's not really that's not really the story. That's
what's been created around him to create to make him
the bard. What do we know about you know, Shakespeare?
Literally We know that he was a businessman above all else.
We know that he evaded taxes twice. We know that
he had restraining orders taken out against him by colleagues.
We know that when there was a famine he bought
(06:04):
up all the grain in Stratford and jacked up the
price for his neighbors. He was a lovely We know
that he never left the country, although he wrote about
places like Denmark and Italy and Egypt with details that
weren't available in guide books. We know he never played
an instrument, but there are more references to musical knowledge
in the Shakespeare plays than any other body of literature.
(06:25):
We know he wasn't university educated, but when he died
he didn't own a single book of his own. And
when he also he had no praise from any other playwrights,
which is also very strange for someone who was the
best known name of the time. What we don't know
about him that he wrote a single word attributed to him.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
It's so delicious. Just as a prospect, did you find
then that after this proceeds, compared to how you first
engage with Shakespeare, do you think least of the man?
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Oh? Yeah, wayless, you know, But also more importantly, I
think more of Amelia. Yeah right, So Amelia, like, let's
look at her life in counterpoint. So she is born
to an Italian family, and her family is incredibly talented musically.
They are found by Henry the eighth and they're brought
over to England as the recorder consort to the King
(07:17):
and then to Queen she's Jewish, but she has to
hide her faith because you couldn't be Jewish at the
time in England. At seven, her dad dies and she's
given as award to this countess, and it's the best
situation for her because she winds up getting this amazing
legal and classical education. When the countess gets remarried and
she's twelve years old, she winds up living with the
countess's brother for a summer, the same summer that he
(07:39):
as ambassador to Denmark, went to go visit the King
and Queen there, and you know characters that happen to
be named in Hamlet, although again Shakespeare never went to Denmark.
The next year, she becomes the mistress at age thirteen
to the Lord Chamberlain of England and for ten years
she's with him. He's fifty six years old, huge age difference,
(08:00):
but he's in charge of all theater in England. So
through him, she is going to see every play that
crosses his desk, to meet all the playwrights, all the producers,
all the theater owners. She's going to be immersed in
that world. When she gets pregnant at twenty three, he
marries her off to her wastrel of a cousin, because
you couldn't have a pregnant mistress living in your house
when you were married. And this guy is a terrible man,
(08:24):
he's our cousin. He blows through all the money that
the Lord Chamberlain has settled on her to keep her
safe for years, and she winds up at twenty three
with a kid, a husband she hates, and she has
to somehow make a living. And then we don't know
what happens until we see that book of poetry that
she publishes in sixteen eleven. But there are decades between them,
which leads to believe you know, she was writing under
(08:46):
someone else's name.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, I'm sure that everyone asks you about this, but
you are famed for the depths of your research and
your novel. So, just to remind our listeners, and this
is only a short selection, you have lived briefly with
the Amish, traveled to Botswana, you have been to prison,
you've observed cardio surgery. So what kind of research was
involved in by any other name?
Speaker 3 (09:10):
So I wound up, first of all, finding all the
historical primary sources that I could find about Amelia, which
are not many. Most of her life we know about
because of a diary of this astrologer slash hack doctor
that she went to when she was having all these miscarriages.
And he kept the amazing diaries in which he talks
(09:31):
about what she said to him, and also how he
tried to get her to sleep with him and she
said no anyway. And so this diary is in the
Ashmolean now, and in it, you know, all everything I
just told you about her life is all in that diary.
I also wound up speaking to multiple academics, a lot
of female Shakespeare scholars. In particular. I talked to the
(09:52):
head historian at the Globe Theater. I had this amazing
document that was someone God blessed them put digitized every
single day of Queen Elizabeth the First's reign, so I
knew what happened single day. So when I read about
a joust, it happened on that day. And when I
tell you after it was on a mission. He was
(10:13):
on a mission, so I was able to really reference
it historically. There's also an incredible map called the August
Map that another wonderful author, Deborah Harkness, put me onto,
and it allows you to overlay Elizabethan England on top
of modern England, so you can see exactly where all
the places were that I was writing about. So I
was kind of juggling all of this Elizabethan stuff, you know,
(10:35):
in my head as I was writing Amelia.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Yeah, that's extraordinary. How amazing to have that, you know,
those kind of resources. I suppose it's given the nature
of the subject, you're fortunate to be able to benefit
from some of those things. Like I mentioned, as you mentioned,
women's voices are still being silenced in certain spaces. I
think it's just over a year now since a number
of your books were removed from schools after a public
(11:01):
campaign by advocacy groups who said they were inappropriate for
young readers. What the might of that whole experience.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
I have become a very vocal advocate to fight book banning.
It is endemic in my country. It has only gotten worse.
My own books were banned well over forty times last
year alone in Iowa. Nineteen Minutes is the most banned
book in Iowa. Last week, state of Utah actually passed
(11:30):
a law that removes thirteen novels from bookshelves completely, which
is a straight out crazy band. I mean, it's a
very slippery slope, and it's very dangerous because you know,
when it's legitimate for a parent to decide what they
want their child to read, it is not legitimate for
that parent to make decisions about everybody else's child. And
(11:51):
of course it is a very slippery, slippery slope. We've
seen challenges increase ninety two percent in public libraries. We
have seen laws that are being passed to punish publishers
that send books directly to schools. And we've also seen
change some progress in that there are multiple lawsuits that
(12:11):
have been enacted against in Iowa and against people in Florida.
School districts in Florida that have enacted bands publishers and
writers are banding together to sue these school districts to
kind of raise awareness and to get these very poorly
worded laws overturned because now we have our educators living
in a culture of fear. But you know, to bring
it again back to by any other name, I think
(12:33):
that's what makes this so timely. We are in America,
We're watching women's reproductive rights being stripped away, and we
are still living in a time where people are making
decisions about what kind of stories should be told, and
who should be the people who tell them? That is
exactly what Elizabeth Thinninglan was.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Like, Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, just honestly just absurd.
To view it from the outside, it feels like the
real time erosion of civilization or something. I know that
sounds grandiose, but it feels like that.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Well, you know. The funny thing was, I very distinctly
remember writing a scene in this book in which a
Puritan was on an overturned great in front of one
of the theaters, and Elizabeth in England and this again
was lifted right out of history and was complaining about
the moral depravity of theater and how it took people
away from God and how all of these theaters needed
(13:22):
to be shut down. And I was reading, you know,
I'm writing this, and I'm reading what I'm writing, and
I was like, oh my gosh, these are the book banners.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, it's just.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
The same thing over and over again, this idea of
considered to be mature content and morally depraved. You know,
what they're calling morally depraved is actually the kind of
information that kids get to use to make sense of
a very difficult world that gives them a sense of
place and allows them to explore worlds and people they
(13:54):
don't know in a safe space. I mean, books create empathy.
Book bands, you know, destroy it.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
I see the Black Lives Mate a sign behind you.
So how are you feeling?
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Well?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Speaking of Shakespeare and uppose, how are you feeling about
the next hundred days?
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Well, I feel a lot better than it was a
few weeks ago. Yeah, you know, it's been really interesting again.
I feel like this book, to me, feels so perfectly
placed because we are in We're at a crossroads in America.
I feel like we're literally standing here and in one
direction we have the threat of a national abortion pan
(14:30):
and on the other direction, we have the chance, a
very real chance. I think of having our first female
president of color, our first female president, and she happens
to be one of color. And you know, I'm kind
of like sitting here going, Okay, America, your move which
way you're gonna go? Yeah? You know, can I come
to New Zealand? Look?
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Please? We would be delighted to have you, absolutely delighted. Yeah,
thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on by
any other name. I know listeners are just so excited
to get into it. And we do hope that we
see you in New Zealand sometime soon.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
You too. I love it there. It's such a great country.
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Thanks Jody, that is Jody Picot. Her new book is
by any other name. All the details, of course, we're
up on the news Talks.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
He'd be website for more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame.
Listen live to news Talks he'd be from nine am Saturday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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