An Hour with Jodi Picoult

Today was the day when I got to meet Jodi Picoult. Granted it wasn't one on one but in a local auditorium with about 100 other fans. She is fantastic! She is very down to earth and real. She was there to promote her new book Change of Heart: A Novel.

I've never been to an author symposium before so this was fun for me. My sister came with me for a day without the kids (OK the 5 week old was with us but we were toddler free).

Jodi read an excerpt from Change of Heart, which was absolutely wonderful to hear an author read their own work. How personal the characters are for her makes the reading all that more intense. She then took questions from the audience about her books and research she does for each of her books.

I did find out that she and 3 friends do children's theatre in her hometown. She writes it and the lyrics for the music, her other friend writes the music and the
3rd friend directs it. She stated that there is more humor in her plays than in her books but they deal with issues that are important to kids. I thought this was awesome.

The audience was comprised off all ages but mainly women, although there were a few men there. There were some young adults there also, which speaks to her ability to grab an audience of all ages with her subject matters.

I was able to get my 5 copies of Change of Heart autographed and 2 of those copies will be given away tomorrow. It was originally 1 copy but due to the response, we decided to do 2.

In May they will be having Chris Bohjalian in to talk about his body of work and his new book Skeletons at the Feast. I might have to take a long lunch to go to that one.