"Jodi Picoult has written a haunting tragedy of two families. The Pact is rich with suspense and compassion, and it will make people question how well they know their own children. It is an intensely moving novel."

—Luanne Rice, author of HOME FIRES

A conversation with Jodi about The Pact

The Inspiration:

In my previous life, before I was a novelist, I was an English teacher. The year I was teaching eighth grade, I was 25 years old – the youngest teacher by far in the school. I had a hundred kids…and one little girl was suicidal. We all knew – her parents, her guidance counselor, and her four subject teachers. It was decided that all of us would work hard to keep her focused, and present. My job, as the English teacher, was to get her to write in a journal and to meet with her daily after school to talk about what she’d written.

I got pregnant that year, and left teaching to have my first son, Kyle. My husband and I moved out of state; and my first novel was published. I embarked on a new career…but I never forgot about that student. I never forgot what it felt like to be someone else’s lifeline…even if there were other people who were towing that line of responsibility beside me. And I knew, when I started to write my fifth book, that my subject matter was going to involve teen suicide.

I wanted to write the anti-Romeo and Juliet story: the families that are too close, insteady of enemies -- and that still wind up hurting their star-crossed children as a result. When I started to conceive of the book, Emily was the one who was going to be left behind after an aborted suicide pact…and this was going to be a character study novel, one that looked at survivor’s guilt. My first research stop was to my local police department, where the chief looked at me and said, “OK, remind me…who’s the one who’s still alive? The boy or the girl?

“The girl,” I said.

He shrugged. “Huh. Because, you know, if it was the guy…and he was bigger and stronger…we’d probably book him on charges of murder until we could prove otherwise.”

I just stared at him. What if, I wondered, Chris was the one who was alive at the start of the book, instead of Emily? What if he lied to you at the beginning of the book…so that you didn’t really know whether he was telling you the truth about anything that had happened that night? Suddenly I no longer had a character study on my hands…I had a page turner.

I hear very often from people who have to put THE PACT down because the ages of their children are too close to the ages of the kids in the novel – and I always say that’s all right, that you’ll be able to come back to it a year or two later. I also hear from parents who say that they’ve used the book as a springboard for talking about teen depression and suicide with their kids…a touchy subject they didn’t really know how to approach. But I think the comments I’m most touched by come from teenagers who read this book – and there are huge battalions of them. They say that Chris and Emily are real teenagers, not the phony ones who usually inhabit adult novels. They say that they’ve had a love like Chris and Emily did, or a heartache. And a few have written to say that, like Emily, they’ve thought about suicide…but after reading THE PACT, they don’t want it to come to that…and so they’re going to tell someone how they’re feeling.

When you write fiction, you don’t ever really expect to change someone’s real life. To know that THE PACT has done just that – maybe even saved a couple – is really humbling.

I don’t know whatever happened to the eighth grade girl I taught so long ago. I’ve heard, from other teachers, that she did graduate from the school system and go off to college. I don’t know if she still struggles with depression. But I hope it would make her happy to know that she is the one who planted the seed in my mind that grew into this garden, and maybe even indirectly was the reason another teenager years later took the time to stop and smell the flowers.

The Research:

The Pact marked a shift in my career in many ways. Not only was it the book that put me on the literary map as a writer – it also was the first one that made me fall in love with research. Since writing it, every novel I’ve tackled has started with hands-on research, experiences that have taken me from courtrooms to prisons, from Amish homes to Eskimo villages to haunted homes.

I think I became a research stickler because I am a careful reader. No one likes to catch a mistake in a book – it makes you feel like the author hasn’t done his or her homework, and I’ve always been a straight-A student…so when I began to write THE PACT, I realized I was going to have to go explore bits of the world that I hadn’t yet lived myself.

My first foray into research took place in my own home. Sadly, I was no longer a teenager (as painful as that is to admit). However, I had a great group of babysitters who came regularly to take care of my three children.  I asked one of them - a spirited, smart 16 year old – if she’d feel comfortable gathering a group of friends and talking to me about what it was really like, now, to be her age. If they promised to be honest and frank, I promised all the Pepsi and pizza they could consume…and I also promised that what I heard wouldn’t leave that room.

Well, I asked the hard questions: How old were you when you first had sex? Why did you do it? Have you ever been depressed? Wanted to kill yourself? Would you tell an adult? Why or why not? Have you used drugs? How old were you? How many phone calls would it take for you to get a gun?

That night when I went up to bed, my husband asked me what I’d learned. I told him…and he got really quiet. “So,” he said. “She’s never babysitting for us again, right?” Actually, she did – often. She went off to college and became just as brilliant a young woman as I’d expected all along…and I never forgot her generosity and her honesty that night, which in my opinion, is why Em and Chris seem so true-to-life.

My next stop for research was jail. I went to the Grafton County Correctional Facility, a minimum security jail that Chris would have been detained in, had he been awaiting trial. I remember thinking it was a human zoo – the only real rights that the prisoners have is deciding whether or not to come look at you as you pass by. I remember it was very warm, and most prisoners wore only their underwear. And I remember meeting one-on-one with inmates, who told me the details that became integral to Chris’s jail experience: how to make a jail tattoo, how to get a spark out of a socket with a lead pencil; how to dry banana peels and roll them up in the pages of the Bible to make a fake cigarette. The remarkable thing about our justice system is that even if Chris were completely innocent, while awaiting trial (if denied bail) he might still wind up bunking with an axe-murderer. I wanted to explore how a normal, everyday kid might be changed by that sort of experience.

Finally, I spent a great deal of time in court, and talking to defense attorneys. There are two kinds – the ones who can explain a client’s guilt away by dint of his difficult childhood; and the ones who really don’t care whether or not their client is guilty, since they’ve simply got a job to do. It was the latter attorney that really intrigued me – that hard shell put up against any emotional connection to the client – and that ultimately became the template for Jordan McAfee. One of my favorite little tidbits of legal information actually changed the course of the book. In America, I would never be asked to testify against my husband, if he were charged with a crime. However, I WOULD be called to testify against my kids. I don’t know about you…but I’d be far more willing to lock away my husband than any of my children! It was this odd loophole that made me want to write a scene in which a mom (Gus) is forced to either incriminate her child…or to lie on the witness stand.