With Sing You Home, Jodi Picoult's fiction becomes reality

Jodi Picoult was working on her latest novel, Sing You Home, when her teenage son Kyle told her he is gay. Though she and her husband weren't surprised by Kyle's revelation, it was a happy coincidence since Sing You Home revolves around a same-sex couple, Zoe and Vanessa, who unexpectedly fall in love and then must confront the forces of the religious right in a most personal way when they decide to start a family. Picoult has never shied from tackling thorny social issues in her mega-selling novels and had long wanted to do a gay storyline, but Kyle's coming out changed her sense of purpose in writing the book.

"It wasn't just a theoretical journey anymore," Picoult explains. "It was really, for me, a mom's mission: how do I make the world a better place so that when Kyle's ready to get married and have his kids, he doesn't have to jump through hoops in order to do it."

Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) will honor Picoult with the Community Award at its 29th annual Summer Party for bringing a nuanced tale of the joys and challenges of being an LGBT family to a wide swath of readers who might otherwise be uninterested in, or unsympathetic to, the subject (Sing You Home topped both the New York Times' and USA Today's best-seller lists). The celebration, which Picoult will attend with her family, takes place July 30 at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum.
Much of the action in Sing You Home takes place in a Rhode Island courtroom, where Zoe and Vanessa battle with Zoe's ex-husband Max, a born-again Christian, for access to frozen embryos that Zoe and Max created when they were married. And who better to represent the couple than the fiery, fictional GLAD attorney Angela Moretti?

Picoult credits her close friend Lise Iwon, the openly lesbian president of the Rhode Island Bar Association and a longtime GLAD collaborator and supporter, for tipping her off to GLAD's expertise in LGBT family law and encouraging her to create the Moretti character, a brassy advocate with a mass of black curls who resembles "Tinker Bell on speed - tiny, talking a mile a minute."

"She told me about GLAD and she told me about some of the lawyers that she's met and it seemed to make perfect sense," says Picoult. "Especially in fiction, if you have the opportunity to highlight something that is honest and real that a lot of people don't know about but that could help them, it's a wonderful gift. So it really was my pleasure to be able to say the world is not a perfect place right now for LGBT people but hey, here's this organization that's going to go to bat for you."

Despite great reviews and brisk sales, Picoult admits she's heard from some evangelical Christians who take issue with characters like Pastor Clive Lincoln, a fire-breathing homophobe who exploits Max to further his anti-LGBT agenda, accusing her of portraying Christians as stupid or intolerant. But the author makes no excuses for her characterizations.

"It's pretty clear if you read the book that it's not meant to represent all Christians. I went out of my way to make sure that was said," Picoult says, noting her intent was to portray the "very vocal minority" of religious conservatives who are using their political influence to anti-LGBT ends. Picoult is happy to engage her critics and set them straight about the inspiration for characters like Pastor Clive.

"This morning I wrote this woman back and I said, what you need to know is that every single word that came out of Pastor Clive's mouth came verbatim from a six-hour interview I did with Focus on the Family, so don't shoot the messenger," she says. "I'm not the one giving Christians a bad name. It's Christians giving Christians a bad name."

Picoult is brimming with pride that Sing You Home is having the impact she intended. "It has changed a lot of minds and I know it has because I get the emails from people who say so," she says. "If you can change even one mind, it's worth writing the story. To know I've done that multiple times is a wonderful thing." The award from GLAD, she adds, makes her success that much sweeter.

"To be honored for doing something that I just felt was the right thing to do," says Picoult, "is icing on the cake."
For more information or to purchase tickets for GLAD's Summer Party, visit www.glad.org/events.


Laura Kiritsy is a former editor-in-chief of Bay Windows. She is now the manager of public education at GLAD.