Timing is everything, they say, and Jodi Picoult is living proof.
The 35-year-old novelist’s ninth novel, “Perfect Match,” recently hit the shelves, and its plot, which revolves around a female district attorney who begins to suspect her child has been molested by a priest, seems snatched from today’s headlines.
“The book is getting a lot of media coverage because of the priest abuse angle, but that’s not why I wrote it,” said Picoult, a Long Island native who now lives with her family in New Hampshire.
“I wanted to write about someone who knows the legal system, knows its flaws and gaps, but doesn’t let it bother her until it affects her personally.”
Still, Picoult has shown similar prescience in the past. Her third book, “Picture Perfect,” about a celebrity who batters his wife, was released around the time O.J. took his white Bronco for a spin.
Another book, “Keeping Faith,” about a 7-year-old who develops stigmata and the gift of healing after a series of spiritual visitations, eerily coincided with the story of 15-year old Audrey Santo, a bed-ridden Massachusetts girl who became the center of a media maelstrom when she began faith-healing from her bedroom in 1999.
“Plain Truth,” also released in ’99, deals with the phenomenon of post-partum depression – and came out on the heels of the Andrea Yates case, which made the subject a national obsession.
“Maybe I’m just a couple of years ahead of my time,” said Picoult. “One reporter asked me on a recent tour if I could please write a book about peace in the Middle East.”
In “Perfect Match,” Nina Frost, an assistant D.A., spends her days prosecuting child molesters and witnessing the routine traumatizing of kids who are forced to testify in court.
But when her son becomes a victim of sexual abuse, she decides that the legal system is inadequate, and takes matters into her own hands, with disastrous results.
“I was doing research for a previous book with an assistant D.A. and I asked her, ‘What would it take to make you break the law?'” recalled Picoult. “She said, ‘If someone did something to my kids.’ That gave me the idea.
“Then, when I decided to write about a molestation, I needed a perp, someone with a built-in trust factor, like a teacher or clergyman. So, you know, I really didn’t pull this out of thin air.”
Regardless, Picoult, who has a master’s degree in education from Harvard and taught creative writing before finding her own voice in fiction, is now in the strange position of commenting on the rash of scandals that’s rocking the Catholic Church.
“You become an expert where you never expected to be an expert,” she said. “But you also have to fear a backlash. With all the media coverage, do people really want to read about this subject anymore?”
The most painful part of writing the book for Picoult, a mother of three, was putting the character of the 5-year-old victim Nathaniel, loosely based on her 8-year-old Jake, into such a dark and troubling predicament.
“I was putting the words of a very happy child into the mouth of a very sad little boy,” she said. “I would go downstairs to the breakfast table and talk to the kids, then use their answers in dialogues featuring Nathaniel. It wasn’t easy.”
Even though Picoult, who’s Jewish, hardly considers herself an authority on the Catholic Church, she’s been repeatedly pressed to offer her view on the inevitable fallout of the recent rash of abuse allegations.
“I think this is a wakeup call, and that things are going to change. There may even be something as revolutionary as another Vatican II,” she said.
“I just really hope ‘Perfect Match’ helps to heal rather than to wound. God knows, there’s already been enough of that going around.”