How Jodi Picoult Lost The Plot

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing for some authors

If you haven’t heard of Jodi Picoult, I guarantee a woman in your life has her books somewhere on their shelves. She has published around thirty novels, with sales totalling over forty million worldwide. Perhaps the unofficial queen of the book club fiction genre, she carved out a niche for herself writing books with great moral dilemmas at the heart of them. Can a school shooter be forgiven for snapping if he was traumatised by relentless bullying from classmates? If a mother knows her child’s sexual abuser will walk free, is she justified in killing him? If a struggling family can’t afford their severely disabled daughter’s medical bills, can we judge them for resorting to suing their obstetrician for wrongful birth?

As you can tell, I’ve read more than a few of Ms Picoult’s books. She was my favourite author in my late teens, a good stepping-stone into the world of adult literature. Her plots are dramatic and emotionally-charged, her research forensic (a little too much so, I’ve skipped pages worth of medical or legal jargon at times). She has good, sometimes very good, turn of phrase. She writes about maternal love very well and is deft at sprinkling a bit of humour, lightness and romance amidst the weightiness.

Most of her novels follow the same addictive formula - multi-character narration, a clear three-act structure culminating in a tense and explosive courtroom scene, and a sometimes-clever-sometimes-convoluted twist at the very end. Throw in a recurring sexy police detective character and you can see why her books are crack cocaine for suburban wine-moms.

While watching interviews with Picoult for research, I came across a very nice clip of her from 2008, being interviewed at her holiday home in Vermont while her children and dogs play in the background. In it, she is a picture of happiness, oozing natural warmth. She cheerfully addresses the camera with a make-up free face and wet hair, clad unselfconsciously in plain, mumsy shorts and a t-shirt. She chats about her vacation, how she always loved to write, and speaks a little about her newly published novel 19 Minutes, which revolved around a school shooting.

“To me, it’s a book about what it means to not fit in, and who really has the right to judge someone else; if anyone really ever has the right to judge someone else...”

[Picoult in 2008]

It’s seventeen years later. Recently, a very different Jodi posted a short video on TikTok. Her hair here too is wet, her face bare, but gone is the joy and contentment. She rants rather than speaks. Her bone of contention is the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the murderer being a lone shooter whose political motivations remain a point of debate.

[Picoult in 2025]

“Just NO. The [leftists] you are criticising have decried the violence that ended the life of someone they opposed. They’ve been honest enough to say that you cannot murder a man who made a living out of preaching hate and an undeserved violent death does not negate the terrible pain he inflicted on others. Secondly, I’m not buying into the hypocrisy. You won’t trick me into believing it’s just about ‘respect for life’ when your side has cheered on families being ripped apart, when your side has proudly supported Alligator Alcatraz merch. When your side immediately jumped to blame trans people and target HBCUs when…shocker!…the shooter was a cis, white man from a Trump-supporting family who was raised to love guns.

“I have ALWAYS condemned all gun violence. And will continue to do so. But as usual, the right only cares about violence when it happens to them. So d’ya know what? Miss me with the fake self-righteousness.”

Well there’s lot to unpack here.

In fact, there’s too much to unpack. I’m going to go out on a limb and say readers of It’s My Room don’t need the more glaring hypocrisies in Ms Picoult’s tirade spelled out and rebuked by me. Moreover, all angles on Kirk’s murder and the response to it have been covered by innumerable commentary pieces. The general consensus is that there has been a truly scary shift in the political atmosphere.

A number of people on the radical left have openly celebrated Kirk’s murder and for many onlookers, this has confirmed progressivism’s wildly inconsistent morality around violence. Some of those expressing disgust and anger at the radical left are people who ardently supported Kirk’s politics, others are people who vehemently disagreed but supported his free speech values and appreciate it’s a tragedy a young man who was a husband and father-of-two was assassinated for the crime of having provocative conversations.

On the flip side, there has undeniably been rabidly concerning behaviour and hypocrisy from a faction of the right, who have taken the opportunity to inflame cultural tensions as much as possible and wreak gleeful revenge on anti-Kirk leftists by employing the same cancel culture tactics used on their ilk. A number of people were doxxed and fired as a result. Given Kirk’s free speech absolutism, this behaviour was hardly a befitting way to honour his memory and I wholly agree there’s been major overreach on the right. The Trump administration’s threat to potentially undermine First Amendment rights is downright chilling.

Yet as dismaying as it is, I understand - if cannot condone - those shrugging and gloating “Well, the left invented cancel culture! You reap what you sow.” The fall-of-Rome feeling is more palpable than ever.

But back to Picoult’s borderline unhinged video. Aside from wet hair, you may have noticed the two women in the above pictures are not quite the same person. Her rant about Kirk went viral after it was shared on X by Libs Of TikTok, an account that serves to paint the modern left as nothing but loonies and r-words. I have mixed feelings about such accounts. I appreciate LoT has drawn attention to a lot of stuff that has helped to peak people to the extremes of certain brands of activism but, as a rule, am not a fan of ‘nutpicking’ to propagandise people against your political enemy. Saying that, the sad truth is that the radical left has a lot of nuts to pick from. All who regrettably love to livestream their meltdowns.

Picoult is not a nut but she certainly could be mistaken for one here. She’s unfortunately made herself a perfect meme for the “This is your brain on wokeism” caption. Despite how much respect I’ve lost for her over the past years, I do find this genuinely sad. How did an author whose creative calling card was being able to take thorny issues and explore all perspectives compassionately become so snarlingly righteous and wilfully ignorant?

Well, I have a theory…

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If one was to pinpoint a clear moment when Picoult completely sold out, most would point to 2022 when she teamed up with a trans-identified male Jennifer (formerly Jim) Boylan to pen a book called Mad Honey. Boylan, a textbook autogynophile, actually contacted Picoult via social media saying he’d had a dream about doing a book collaboration with her and she evidently saw fit to make his dream come true.

I confess I made it a quarter way through Mad Honey before skimming and binning. It wasn’t just the impending gender woo propaganda that put me off, in recent years I’ve genuinely grown bored of Picoult’s samey formula. If you can stomach a detailed outline of all the ideological brainwashing in the book, I recommend this two-part essay. Let’s just say it’s quite clear Picoult’s research for this book didn’t extend beyond Pink News.

Gender ideology as we are all *extremely* aware at this point, has a lobotomising effect on otherwise intelligent-seeming people. Picoult is one who wears her forehead stitches with excruciating pride. It was both surreal and cringeworthy seeing her, a Harvard-educated women in possession of eyes, sitting side-by-side with the hulking, bass-voiced Boylan on their book tour, talking with a straight face about how they’ve both had very different paths into womanhood.

As an aside though, kudos to Boylan, a pretty unknown writer. Not only was it a great career move riding the coattails of a female author a hundred times more successful than him, Picoult is famed for her meticulous research and balanced viewpoint. He couldn’t have picked a smarter useful idiot to funnel this nonsensical, harmful agenda through.

No one capable of lying to themselves and others can realistically maintain a cohesive moral compass, never mind an intellectual one. When Picoult started blocking sex-realist women on social media for objecting to her decreeing TWAW, I was profoundly disappointed. But it was when I saw a clip of Picoult comparing the plight of female victims of domestic violence to the plight of men who desperately want to be women, on the basis that their bodies “have failed” them, that my disappointment skyrocketed to abject disgust. Comparing the “failure” a women may feel for being unable to defend herself against male violence due to physical vulnerability with a man’s sad feelings about not being born with female anatomy is so insulting and ignorant I feel sick just typing the words.

Henceforth, I’ve looked at Picoult not as someone who is misguided but someone who is outright lost. Of course, she sees herself as the exact opposite, as someone not only ethically sound but superior and, contrary to smiley, open-minded Jodi in 2008, as someone who very much has the right to judge other people now. But it wasn’t Mad Honey that instigated this drastic shift in outlook. No, it was back in 2016, when she published a novel called Small Great Things, exploring a subject that is probably the biggest gateway drug into sanctimonious, paint-by-numbers progressivism…white privilege.

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Small Great Things has a classic Picoult conundrum at its heart. It tells the story of Ruth, a black woman and senior midwife who one day finds herself confronted with two white supremicist patients who forbid her from having anything to do with the delivering or caring for their baby. After the child is born, Ruth unexpectedly finds herself alone with the infant when it suddenly stops breathing. She makes the professional choice to ignore the patients’ racist demand and tries to unsuccessfully save the child. Subsequently, she finds herself on trial for murder.

Picoult’s self-insert in this book is Kennedy, the white lawyer Ruth hires. Kennedy is a middle-class working mum with impeccable liberal credentials, someone who would never consider herself a racist. But as Kennedy will learn - just as Picoult learned in the process of writing and researching the book - she is, in fact, racist. Because all white people are, whether we know it or not.

To this end, Small Great Things is half legal drama, half EDI seminar. Here are some direct quotes copy and pasted from Goodreads.

“Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed.”

“Active racism is telling a nurse supervisor that an African American nurse can’t touch your baby. It’s snickering at a black joke. But passive racism? It’s noticing there’s only one person of color in your office and not asking your boss why. It’s reading your kid’s fourth-grade curriculum and seeing that the only black history covered is slavery, and not questioning why. It’s defending a woman in court whose indictment directly resulted from her race…and glossing over that fact, like it hardly matters.”

“When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be a savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they’ve enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.”

I’ll spare you any more.

It’s important to keep in mind that in 2016, this very black-and-white (pun intended) racial commentary was only just beginning to be rammed down people’s throats in the workplace and elsewhere. When Picoult wrote this, it probably seemed to readers, in the obsolete, positive sense of the word, very woke. Having said that, even back then when I was at my wokest, the book fell flat for me. The takeaways on white privilege were so superficial, so paint-by-numbers, so obnoxiously and sanctimoniously written, it felt almost lazy.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with Picoult writing a book exploring race this way. It’s true we all have unconscious biases and why not use literature to try and make us reflect on this. As a story, it’s a decent conversation starter. The problem is that, as far as Picoult was concerned, her book was the entire conversation, in terms of its definitive conclusion: all white people are privileged and racist. Do better. The end.

In interviews promoting Small Great Things, Picoult talked earnestly about how ignorant she was, how blind to her privileges, how humbling talking to black people about their life experiences were. The humility though, was a veneer. She may well have crowned herself the supreme expert on all things white privilege, on a quest to educate and enlighten other white people - all of us - who hadn’t yet heard the word from the Gospel of Liberal Guilt. (2016, as if we could forget, saw Donnie Darvo first seize the White House, and as one of many influential figures in the publishing world with a chronic case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, this only strengthened Picoult’s resolve as a progressive prophet).

This is something that as a long-time Picoult reader, I probably should have seen coming. I’ve been to two of her book signings, one for the release of a novel called House Rules, about an autistic teenage boy accused of murder, and the other for a novel called Lone Wolf, which centres on a man who devoted his life to studying wolves. For both these books she did rigorous research on both their extremely different subject matters - Asperger’s syndrome and wolf theriology yet, much like the structure of her books, each live talk had an identical tone and formula. I can attest that Picoult talks at her audience, not to us, almost as though we are her pupils. Despite only being a student herself five seconds ago with almost all the topics she throws herself into as a writer, it only takes a few months before she carries herself as an honorary expert. There’s no exception to this rule across any of her books, whether it’s marine biology (Songs Of The Humpback Whale), Alaskan Inuits (The Tenth Circle), Amish culture (Plain Truth), Asperger’s syndrome, white privilege or why men actually can become women. See the problem here?

A generous analysis of Picoult is that she’s rather like a secondary schoolteacher whose overwhelming enthusiasm for her subject outstrips her wisdom, the kind who fed you an overly-simple or inaccurate curriculum you didn’t realise was questionable until long after graduation.This kind of good-willed arrogance is irksome enough when it comes to general knowledge, when it seeps into political outlook, it becomes not only insufferable but dangerous. Especially when you have a fanbase as large as Picoult’s.

Yet while she always a firm democrat-voting lefty liberal, there was a time when Picoult used her voice as an unusually listened-to writer to try and unite people and challenge her own views. On tricky matters like capital punishment, abortion, the failures of the justice system, and even gay rights vs evangelical christian lobbies, she did have a knack for humanising all perspectives - including the ones she vehemently opposed. Maybe my admiration for her work as a younger woman is sentimentalising my judgement but I feel the Jodi of 2008 wouldn’t have produced schlock propaganda like Mad Honey if she hadn’t fallen down the SJW rabbit hole when writing Small Great Things. The gender issue, for instance, is something I could have imagined her delving into sensitively but boldly, striking a balance in tone similar to The Witch Trials Of J.K. Rowling podcast. She could have been a cautiously firm challenger in the face of #nodebate, rather than one of the slogan’s biggest literary champions. What a shame.

Likewise, while it’s perfectly reasonable for her to despise Trump and his administration, its depressingly telling she has never shown any curiousity beyond ‘bigotry’ as to why half her fellow countrymen and women cast their vote for him or reject the politics she believes in, and explore it in her writing. If any fiction book was capable of bridging the vast cultural division between Americans, she once would have been the ideal candidate to write it. But evidently, she has completely lost this ability. Since 2016 she’s only ascended further and further up her own ass; now a quintessential upper normie who refuses to see the writing on the gender neutral bathroom wall and posts bug-eyed scolding videos on social media for claps from her captive echo chamber. As much as I don’t care for the phrase, I can see why it’s called the woke mind virus.

In conclusion, if you have a woman (or indeed, man) in your life who remains a devout Jodi Toady, this Christmas it might be worth buying them some Lionel Shriver.