AMERICAN author Jodi Picoult is, by all appearances, a happy person. She greets you with a huge smile, her red curls bouncing about her face even though they are still damp from a shower.

It is mid-afternoon and the 42-year-old hasn't slept since getting on a plane in Scotland the night before, but you wouldn't guess it by how she gesticulates and laughs often while chatting in the Raffles Hotel's drawing room.

Admittedly, the author of best-selling novels such as My Sister's Keeper (2004) and, most recently, Change Of Heart (2008), has much to smile about. Her 15 novels have sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, and top bestsellers' lists across the globe, including Britain, India and Singapore.

Because of her financial success, she and her husband Tim, her college sweetheart, can afford to stay home and look after their three children, aged 16, 14, and 12. They live on a 5.26ha homestead in Hanover, New Hampshire, and enjoy the company of many pets: 'Two dogs, two donkeys, a four-week-old calf, a rooster, five chickens, three ducks and two geese.'

Laughing at your incredulous face, the author, who was in town on a three-month international book tour, says that maintaining the menagerie is 'fun', before launching into an anecdote about their rooster, which has taken to hitching rides on the backs of the donkeys.

Missing from her life, it seems, are the dramatic hardships and conflicts which pack her page-turners, well known for tackling hot-button social issues.

For example, The Pact (1998) deals with teen suicide, My Sister's Keeper with genetic engineering and Nineteen Minutes (2007) with school shootings. Change Of Heart takes on religion and the death penalty.

That readers relate to her novels is evident from the hundreds of fan e-mail she gets - and personally replies to - every day.

Though she does get the usual hate mail, or the more unusual requests for relationship advice, she says she also gets letters from suicidal teenagers who decide to get help after reading The Pact, and from girls who come forward about being date-raped after reading The Tenth Circle (2006).

'When you write fiction, you don't think about being able to help people. Yet sometimes you can, which is really a gift,' says the writer, who studied writing at Princeton University and has a master's in education from Harvard.

She jokes that her international success is part of her plans for 'global domination', before saying that she never expected her novels to resonate outside of the United States.

'I think I am writing about very American issues. But then I go abroad and realise that they are not American issues at all. Everyone's thinking about the same things, everyone's worried about the same things.'

In Singapore, she has been an almost constant presence on the LifeStyle bestsellers' list since 2006.

Distributor Pansing, which began to bring in her novels in 2004, reports that she is its fifth best-selling author behind money-spinners such as Jeffrey Archer and Audrey Niffenegger.

Borders, Kinokuniya and MPH bookstores count her as one of their top bestsellers.

Mr Matthias Low, merchandising manager of MPH bookstores, says: 'Readers are able to relate as her books touch on family relationships, love and moral dilemmas, and are based on her solid research of contemporary issues.'

Borders book buyer Teresa Hoon, 28, adds: 'Her books mark a progress from the lighter mass fiction, like romance and chick lit, into the serious literary fiction genre. It has the potential to capture readers from both ends of the spectrum.'

She cries when she writes

Blind faith and dying wish to save child

CHANGE OF HEART By Jodi Picoult Hodder & Stoughton/Paperback/447 pages/ $27 before GST/Major bookstores/** 1/2 THE New York Times has a point about the jackhammer. Subtlety is missing from Change Of Heart, from the punny title to the dramatic moral dilemmas which are created through a series of highly improbable coincidences. But complaining about its subtlety, or lack thereof, is beside the point. Rather, like a problem sum in a maths examination, the prose is less important than the questions it puts forth. One of these is blurbed on the cover: 'Would you grant your enemy's dying wish to save your child's life?' This is the mind-boggler faced by June, whose husband and daughter are shot to death by a handyman, Shay Bourne. Eleven years later, her remaining daughter needs a new heart. Shay, whose execution is in weeks, sees the appeal for organ donors on television and is determined to offer his own. Then there's the whole messiah thing. Shay - a 33-year-old carpenter, as pointed out by another character - has seemingly started to perform miracles, turning water into wine, curing an inmate of Aids and multiplying a stick of bubblegum. This is actually where the book gains some edge, as the author argues against blind faith through a history lesson about the Gnostic gospels and their politically motivated exclusion from the Bible. Unfortunately, several twists too many turn the novel from an interesting problem sum into something of a farce. Still, it certainly offers more to chew on than most of the other titles it tends to share the bestsellers' list with. Stephanie Yap

Fans like reading her simply because they want to know what happens next. Student Charlene Aw, 20, says: 'She turns controversial issues into heart-rending situations, and always provides an extra twist at the end.'

But popularity comes with its price. Book critics dismiss Picoult's writing as formulaic and middle-brow. The New York Times, for example, described Change Of Heart as a 'tear-jerker on authorial autopilot' and 'blessed with the subtlety of a jackhammer'.

What does she think of such criticism?

'If people say my writing is formulaic, I am stunned. My books are wildly different from each other,' she says.

'There might be recurring themes, about people who won't open their eyes to something right in front of them, or how far you would go for someone you love. But you could say that of anyone who is considered as a literary writer.'

Though she appears more resigned than defensive on this issue, she doesn't deny that she has a bone to pick with detractors of commercial fiction.

'I always want to say, 'And who do you think was commercial fiction 200 years ago?' I mean, we look at Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen. The people we read today as the classics were actually people doing what I do back in their time,' she declares with a chuckle.

What most readers agree on, though, is that the research she does for each of her novels appears impressively thorough.

For Change Of Heart, in which one of the characters is sentenced to death, she went to a prison in Arizona, visiting its death-row and execution room and even befriending a convicted murderer named Robert Towery, to whom she has continued to write since meeting him three years ago.

She says: 'Robert is a very nice man who asks after my children, draws me beautiful pictures and keeps me updated on the plots of Lost and Grey's Anatomy when I am overseas.

'And 12 years ago, stoned out of his mind, he tried to sedate a man he had robbed by injecting him with battery acid and, of course, killed him.'

She says she makes it a point to present both sides of a controversial issue, and while she herself is against capital punishment, she understands why some families of murder victims seek solace from it.

'I have had a very hard time figuring out why I believe what I believe,' she says. 'You talk to someone like Robert and think you believe a certain thing, then you sit down with a mother who has lost her child to a violent crime and your mind just changes.

'Revenge can look an awful lot like justice to someone.'

When asked if she ever gets emotionally overwhelmed while writing, she nods emphatically. As it turns out, she herself sometimes finds her own happy life unexpectedly reflected in her fiction.

'I always cry when I write my books. In this one, there is a scene where a mother talks about the clothes she picked to bury her child in, and I was hysterical writing that scene. I didn't know why.

'Then, I realised I had described this outfit my own daughter had.'

Pick of the crop

CONTEMPORARY dilemmas are at the heart of three of Jodi Picoult's most popular novels.

The Pact (1998)	My Sister's Keeper (2004)	The Tenth Circle (2006)
A 17-year-old girl is dead from a gunshot to the head and when questioned by the police, her boyfriend, who was holding the gun, claims that they had made a suicide pact.	Anna was conceived by her parents to be a genetic match for her ill older sister Kate, so that she could donate bone marrow. However, when Kate needs a kidney transplant, Anna sues her parents for control of her own body.	Trixie is devastated when her handsome boyfriend breaks up with her. After they have had sex at a party, she claims that he raped her.

All titles are available for $18.14 with GST at Books Kinokuniya.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on May 18, 2008.