Welcome to the Book Show, a celebration of reading and writers. I'm Joe Donnieu.
This is an off-the-shelf edition of the Book Show, and partnership with
Nurse Shire Bookstore in Manchester Center Vermont and recorded before
a live audience. Jodi Pico is the author of a string of best-selling novels with
themes often mirroring the headlines. Her latest book is The Story Teller. The
novel is about sage singer, a young woman from a Jewish background who becomes
friends with Joseph, an older German man in town, soon Joseph asks sage to
help him die. A fate he says he deserves because he was a Nazi officer. In the
process of finding out more about him, sage learns more about her grandmother's
own story of surviving the Holocaust. Again, the new book is The Story Teller. It is a
great pleasure to welcome Jodi Pico to this week's Book Show.
You know, this book is remarkable because, and I tried to summarize it just a bit
in the introduction, but at what point do you come to that idea and say this,
not only that idea, but say this is something I can work with and think about and
have my readers think about it. This book in particular began with a
different book. It began with Simon Viesenthal's book The Sunflower. I had read it
probably in high school at some point, and I was thinking about it and thinking
about the general conceit of the book. It was written about an experience he had as a
concentration camp prisoner when he was called to the bedside of a dying Nazi
officer, and this guy wanted a Jew. Any Jew would do to confess his sins to so
that he could then be absolved and die in peace. And over the course of the
book, Viesenthal comes to see that he cannot forgive this man. Even if he wanted
to, he is not the one upon whom the sins were perpetrated. Those people are dead,
so basically the Nazi is out of luck. Since the book has been written, it has been
republished in multiple forms with new epilogues at the end,
commentaries by theologians and politicians and philosophers weighing in on what
Viesenthal came to decide to do and telling what they would do in their
situation if they had been in that situation. And it kind of got me thinking, if you
do something really, really bad, could you spend the rest of your life trying to
do good things and ever erase that stain? And by the same token, if you consider
yourself a morally good person, is there any one thing that could make you do
something the rest of us would consider pretty bad like killing someone? And it
was there a way to take what Viesenthal had written about and update it for a
modern generation in a way that would allow us to see why these stories are
still so important 70 years later. The nature of good and evil. That's what you
want us to think about. It was a tiny little thing I was thinking about. But yeah,
that was it. It's simple. And yet I assume takes you a long time to get to that
point of saying, this is how we are going to portray good. This is how we're going
to portray evil. And oh, by the way, you may not be able to tell the difference.
For me, it really did start with good and evil. You know, what does it mean to be
good? What does it mean to be evil? And I still remember walking and thinking,
well, what's the worst thing anyone could do? And immediately I thought the
Holocaust. And that was immediately where I went. With that in mind. And saying,
okay, that's where I'm going to head. What you are known for, of course, is the
research of going into the research. So stop one for you is where? My mother.
Yes. An unlikely place. But my mother lives part time in Scottsdale, Arizona. And I
knew she had been to some anti-definition league events. So I said, you know,
do you think that you could arrange maybe to find some Holocaust survivors who
would talk to me? And I swear to you, within 30 minutes, she had a list of nine
names and contact information. And she really ought to work for the government.
She's a little scary. You know, and I actually wound up working my way through
that list and talking to many of the men and women on the list. I can tell you
about some of their incredible stories. There was a man named Bernie. Bernie grew
up in a town of 5,000 Jews. By the end of the war, there were only 36. He told me
how when the Germans came to occupy the town, his family and friends would go
under into the basement of their apartment building. And they would hear the
Germans walking around upstairs while they hid. One night there was a young
woman who was carrying a baby that was crying. The baby wouldn't shut up. So they
kept feeding it little bits of bread. And it was still crying. So she juggled it
up against her shoulder. And she accidentally smothered her own infant. She
walked upstairs, sat on the curb, and just stayed there for three days until the
next roundup because she had nothing left to live for anymore. Bernie also, when
he was finally taken from his home, he managed to grab onto the doorframe of his
house and pry off the Mississa, which is a little strip of metal with a scroll
inside that's been blessed. He held onto that Mississa in the bottom three
fingers of his hand, curled around it for the entire war. His hand fused shut.
And after the war, he had to have it surgically open so that the Mississa could
be taken out. And he showed it to me when we met. It was absolutely incredible.
Wow. And he's just one survivor. I can keep going.
Well, okay. So how do you not become intimidated in the sense of, well, how as a
writer, how as a storyteller, am I going to beat that?
Well, I don't think I can beat that nor would I want to. There's no way fiction
should ever take the place of reality, particularly in the case of these stories.
These men and women have very important stories to tell. The character of
Minka in the story who is Sage's grandmother, the one who is the Holocaust
survivor, is braided together from threads of many people's lives. Everything
that Minka experiences has happened to a survivor that I spoke with. And so I
basically created a new reality for her by shaping all of these incidents
together into one whole. I don't really see it as creating something bigger
or tougher or sadder. I see it as blending a lot of realities.
When you blend those realities, tell us how Sage came into the mix because this
is a young woman who is dealing with the death of her mother. And she's having
a really tough time with it. She's going to a grief group. This is where she
meets Joseph, who's 95 years old. And she's been through a lot. She's been
through a lot of these groups. And it's tough. Sage is a loner. Sage doesn't
connect because of a scar on her face and because she has this horrible
secret she's hiding and she's just not really good with people. And it is a
surprise to her when her new best friend is a 95-year-old man of all people. And
not just that, but a 95-year-old man that everyone in town knows. He's
everyone's favorite adoptive grandpa. He is a retired teacher. He leads the
fourth of July parade. She's like the only person in town who doesn't know him.
When he asks her to help him die because he used to be a Nazi, he doesn't
realize at first that her grandmother is a survivor. And so it adds this new
wrinkle. If she decides to help him, is it mercy? Is it revenge? Is it justice?
Sage was a really important character to me because she epitomizes a lot of
the young generations in this country today who are thinking, why are we still
hunting Nazi war criminals? They're in their 90s. Who are they going to hurt? And
why do we have to keep talking about this stuff? It happened so long ago.
Sage also is of Jewish heritage but not a believer. She is an atheist, a confirmed
atheist. And that was another very early decision that I made because I think
there is a tendency to think of the Holocaust as a Jewish issue. Six million
Jews died in the Holocaust. Well, five million non-Jews died in the Holocaust.
It's not a Jewish problem. It is a human rights problem and everyone should
care about it. So to be able to get Sage to a point where she is convinced, this
is still important. This is still necessary 70 years later is to convince anyone
who's reading it. Obviously with your Jewish heritage, do you look at it and say,
okay, this is my view of the issue. Well, no, because like Sage, I don't identify
with a religion. We're all humanists in my house. I grew up with parents who were,
I would call marginally Jewish. We did not have a religious existence but, you
know, yeah, we did have a satire every now and then. And we never had a
Christmas tree. My religious upbringing as a child was very much based on
culture more than it was religious doctrine. And at this point, my family
doesn't subscribe to any religious doctrine. And for me, it really does not
come down to God. Almost like in Minka's case, Minka comes out of the Holocaust and
is not a believer anymore. And that is what I found talking to survivors. Half of
them became very religious and the other half really didn't want anything to do
with religion anymore. So I really could have gone either way with her. You know, I
feel that it's very important to not marginalize the Holocaust just based on
religion because that's kind of what made us get there in the first place. In
reading this novel, it reminded me of two of your past books and one is keeping
faith, which you delve into the issues of religion. Does that help in the
writing or even in the research that you sort of have that baseline? Sometimes it
does. It didn't in this book because it wasn't as though I retread ground with
previous people who'd helped me do research. But for example, the rabbi that I
used to do research in keeping faith wound up helping me again with other books
in the future after keeping faith. So that was a good connection to make. I do
think that too is a book about the nature of belief. So it's change of heart for
that matter. And that was the other book I was going to mention because that's
very much about forgiveness. Right. Exactly. I think I could write 40 books
about belief and forgiveness and maybe come down on a different side of it with
every book because what I'm thinking at that point in my life also changes.
With that, you and I are just about the same age. We're in our mid 40s and you've
written a lot of books and that. What have you been doing? No, I'm kidding. Well,
sorry. Exactly. I'm kidding. I mean that's a lot to sustain that and to keep it
and ultimately to find your niche, to find your place in that huge market.
My first book was published when I was 25. I'm 46. I've published a book a year
there were times we were off by a month, which is why it's not 21 or whatever. I've
been working really hard and really steadily for a very long time. It's
interesting that you talk about a niche because I was a very hard sell when I
was starting out. I don't think the publishing company's really knew what to do
with me. I did not write books about women who meet in the hot tub and discover
they're all dating the same guy. I think they would have preferred if I was
writing that actually. But I wasn't. I was writing about things that were really
heavy, that weren't light, fluffy, beet reeds that were emotional and devastating
and that often asked a morality question. It's to write morality fiction if you
want to call it a niche is not new. You could certainly say the Dickens did that
for example or Jane Austen did that. But there weren't many people doing it when
I started out in the 90s and I think the niche sort of grew around me because I
didn't want to change what I wrote. So instead I just was lucky enough to find
people who actually wanted to read it and then told their friends and told
their friends and so on and you know we got to a point where more people were
reading my books and and maybe publishers began to think oh we can't publish
this stuff. Neonatocyte, the death penalty, mercy killing, stem cell research, what
it means to believe in God, what it means to not believe in God, the right to die, gay rights,
the Holocaust. I'm a party aren't I?
So with those issues, morality fiction, what do you want us the reader to do
because you have said look I'm not coming to any conclusion but it's something
that you want the audience you want your readers to wrestle with because you're
wrestling with it. Right. I don't think it's my job to tell you what to think. I
have an opinion I'm very outspoken I'm always happy to tell you my opinion but my
opinion is no more valid than your opinion and your opinion may be different from
mine. What I do think it's my job to do is to take a given controversial
situation and lay out all different facets of that issue so that you then get
to look at it and decide why your opinion is what it is. You may wind up
changing your mind you may not but it is probably the first time that you've ever
really evaluated why you believe what you believe. Most of us form our opinions
at our parents' knees or because our church told us to think that sometimes
it's good to shake it up a little. The thing I find interesting about your work and
about those issues and the issues that you write about of whether it be the
death penalty or gay rights or stem cell research is that we as a reading
public are buying into them we're thinking about it we want to read about it
it's not the women in the hot tub it's deep and it's heavy stuff. Why can't we
then take it one step further after we've put down the book and do something
about the issues? I don't know if I had the answer to that I'd be a lot more
wealthy than I am to tell you the truth. You know I honestly don't know I don't
know where the transition goes I think you know I don't know maybe we need to
ship copies of my books to everyone in Washington maybe that's the answer.
There you go. I think that I do think that we often become polarized in our
country. One of the reasons I've written books like for example Change of Heart
was because I really felt as though you could almost fold the country on a
fault line of religion and I really wanted to look at an issue that is very
divided by religious beliefs which is why I picked the death penalty. I think
that the first step is being able to have empathy for someone who doesn't
think the way you do. The fact that your books are so popular the fact that
people are reading them the fact that we have a theater filled with people
here tonight indicates that those issues are resonating and people want to
talk about them and I'm sure I was just watching you and why people want to
talk about this stuff and it fascinates me of then when the book closes
perhaps we then stop thinking about it or talking about it. I don't believe they do.
I really don't because I think that's what fiction does. Fiction allows you to
then take the book and say to someone else read this so we can talk about it
and having those conversations I think that's really the way you begin to change
the world. I can tell you that I've had letters from kids for example who were
disowned by their family after coming out and then redcing you home and said I
read that book and you made me feel normal again. That's an amazing thing. I've had
letters from young men and women who said I was suicidal I read the pact I don't
want to wind up like Emily I'm telling an adult today. You don't expect to change
a life when you write fiction but every now and then you do which is a remarkable
benefit and a really humbling experience. I think that it's a slow change but
it's a sea change. And by no means do I mean to put all of this on your shoulder?
No, no. I'm going to leave now. I'm going to change the world.
Okay now it's your job but also it's a society because we because we care about
these things. It seems like that we we we care about them. But I also think that
there's a tendency to think of Americans as pretty stupid you know and readers as
really stupid and I don't buy into that. I have never dumbed down my readers. I
don't want to write chapters that you can finish in one toilet sitting. I
don't want you know I I'm not gonna I'm not gonna not pick a topic because I
think that you don't have a picture on the radio doesn't it? Yeah you know I
really I trust my readers they are smart engaged intelligent people who have
always been willing to go wherever I want to take them no matter how crazy it is.
I'm really thrilled by that and I'm really grateful for that. A lot of writers
don't have that gift. They don't have readers who who are willing to engage and
who are willing to go wherever you want to go. Some readers want the same book
over and over. I think that's exactly what my readers don't want. Just looking at
the book it seems to be the way they're marketed is toward women but you have
said many times that just under half of your readers are met. Yeah I was so
tired of being called a women's fiction author that I actually kept count for
three months and 47% of my fan mail comes from men. More women usually come to
events I think it's because they have to get out more you know but I get a lot
of letters from guys who read the books and take away they take away very
different things. They see themselves in the male characters a lot of my books
have male protagonists and you know there's no reason that you can't read a
book about the death penalty and identify with it as a male. I don't know why
anyone would think that's a particularly female-centric topic. I think
honestly we live in a country where if you are a woman and you have two X
chromosomes you must be writing chicklet. I don't think that's necessarily true.
There's nothing wrong with chicklet it's a great genre it's fun if you want
something light and funny to boost you up and it's got a place in the literary
canon as much as mystery or thriller or morality fiction does but anyone who
reads the storyteller and says this is a great work of chicklet I don't know what
they're thinking. And yet you have the white tones and there's there's a
back of a woman's head and do you ever have that fight with the publisher and say
you know do we have to do that? This was actually the second incarnation of this
cover and believe me this is the better one you know and there's only one cover
that I flat out said we cannot do this it was for handle with care which was
about wrongful birth lawsuits and the picture was this very close-up fetal
profile it was like a baby in utero and it just it totally creep me out
honestly and I left it on my kitchen counter for a few days just to kind of see
what would happen everyone who walked into my kitchen went oh what is that so I
said look this is not going to work it's very off-putting and you know they said
oh but it's a baby everyone loves babies I said that's not a baby that's like a
half-cooked tadpole you know and anyway I mean I trust publishers to know
what sells in their market this book would never sell in England my British
covers are so quiet the colors are much less brassy that doesn't sell in
America in Poland all my covers are cartoons I don't know why you know so it's
a very interesting thing but publishers tend to think they know their market in
America there is a tendency like I said to assume female author must be
you know pitched for women must look like a woman's book I don't necessarily
think that's right but the alternative is going to be you know the Harlan
Cobain thriller type the storyteller you know big block print and that
wouldn't be right either I don't know necessarily what the answer is I'm just
really grateful to men who look past you know the pretty girl with the flower
in her hair and say I don't care I just want to read the book right but again
keep in mind over 60% of the book by public is female in America you became my
patron saint when you were very outspoken to the New York Times about their
review their multiple reviews of Jonathan Franzen and and said look you got
three reviews of a white male yeah and there's a lot of great books being
written by women and you're not reviewing them right and I tweeted that and
honestly I didn't expect it to be the ginormous storm that it became I think it
was just a very slow news day but you know I basically good for you yeah well you
know what one of the really nice things about being a successful writer is that
people do sometimes listen when you speak the interesting thing about that is
when I said that immediately the backlash was stop winding what are you
complaining about you're successful you know you have readers you have
fans you have sales why are you complaining I actually wasn't complaining I get
plenty of reviews I get a lot of review coverage actually for a
commercial fiction author and for a woman but there are a lot of women who
don't and if you're lucky enough to have a moment at the podium isn't it a
good thing to stick up for other people who haven't quite gotten there yet and
that's really what I was trying to do and what I continue to try to do you know
if you're at all interested in this Vita is a group that actually crunched the
numbers to see the disparity between the number of reviews given to male
authors versus female authors and also the number of male reviewers versus
female reviewers and across the boards and especially at the New York Times
it's roughly sometimes two thirds to one third in favor of men so I'm not
making this stuff up it's true why do you think that is I don't know I I mean I
really don't know because like I said the majority of book buyers are women so
we've got a lot of female readers at this point in publishing there are still a
lot of women in publishing even in the heads of publishing companies but I think
unfortunately at some of these older review outlets whether you're talking
about the Times or the Atlantic they are still a very patriarchal guard what kind
of coverage have they given you I saw a piece that they did in February with you
that was it was a Q&A yeah and you could call that it could be an attack too I
don't know yeah it's very much what it seems like yeah that was a three hour
interview really that was cut down to one tiny page yeah and they they get to
make the cuts it was very interesting experience and I actually think I came
off as you know I spoke my mind I told the truth nothing he said was was an
accurate you know I was blunt you know again I think there's that sense well
you know she's just wanting again she's complaining again that really wasn't
what I was trying to do at all but I wasn't gonna lie to him either so you know
and I get I get a lot of coverage actually more coverage from the New York
Times than a lot of commercial fiction writers who are women most of the time
they don't review the book and they just complain because I write commercial
fiction and that's a whole different problem because in addition to the
disparity between men and women writers there's also a huge disparity between
the attention given to commercial fiction writers and literary fiction writers
there is an assumption that because Mr. Frans and writes literary fiction his work
has got to be more worthy and better written but there are lots of commercial
fiction writers who are very wonderful stylists and craftsmen and who push the
envelope when they try to write commercial fiction and I think to dismiss
them out of hand is absolutely wrong so when you think about the next step
you're going to a new publisher and actually in that New York Times piece one of
the things that you said was I'm not necessarily looking for sales but you
did say you're you're looking to be more of a franchise the best way I can
describe it is this you have a room full of readers here right and most people
if you said my name to a room full of readers they would say yeah I know she is
but if you said my name to someone who admits I never read they will not know
who I am yet if you said the name James Patterson to them if you said the
name Joyce Carol oats to them they're gonna know who that is and I think that
right now in America there is sort of a branding of names I've been very lucky to
have sales and to have readership but I think for me to continue to evolve
that's what I would really like to move into.
Jody Pico's new book is The Storyteller is published by Aitria Jody thank you so
much for being with us what an absolute thrill. It's been my pleasure thank you.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show you can email us at book
at wamc.org and you can listen again to this or find past book shows at
wamc.org. Sarah Laduke produces our program special thanks to Katie
Britain this off the shelf edition was recorded in Manchester Center Vermont at
Northshire bookstore event northshire.com bookmark us for next week and
thanks for listening for the book show I'm Joe Dona you.
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