Mad Honey
Mad Honey
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Jodi Picoult on Mad Honey
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A Twitter DM and a question she couldn’t answer aloneThe book’s origin is a piece of publishing lore that Picoult tells with some amusement: the entire project launched inside a dozen Twitter messages exchanged in real time. But the subject matter had been waiting long before Boylan’s tweet arrived. Picoult had been sitting on a question about intimacy and concealment, and the impulsive DM gave it a form.
I’ve wanted to write a story like this for a while, that questions how well we know the people we love the most, and whether there is a difference between what is secret and what is private. But the novel began with — of all things — Twitter!
Choosing Boylan as co-author was not simply a matter of friendship or admiration. Picoult had a specific gap she knew she could not fill alone: she wanted to write about what it means to be a woman in America, and her own experience as a cisgender woman left half the picture unwritten. She named that gap directly when explaining the partnership.
She and I have had completely different experiences as women in America. And I knew that if I was going to write a book about what it meant to be a woman in America, she and I could create something that had never been done before.
Picoult was candid about why she did not attempt a novel about transgender experience on her own. She drew on her work researching Sing You Home, a novel about a lesbian couple’s fight for embryo rights, as evidence that inhabiting a world she had not personally lived required a collaborator who had.
It’s a world that I haven’t personally lived. I’m a cisgender woman, which means that I was born into a female body and I stayed in a female body. And I knew that Jenny had had a very different life experience in terms of what it means to be a woman in this country. [paraphrased from audio]
Olivia, one of the novel’s two alternating narrators, is a woman who escaped a violently abusive marriage before the story begins. That backstory was not atmospheric detail; Picoult designed it to answer a specific dramatic question about whether suffering narrows or expands a person’s capacity for empathy.
One of the reasons for making Olivia a former victim of abuse in *Mad Honey* was to give an example of a battered woman who can still choose compassion and understanding, when it comes to gender identity.
How she wrote it
Beehives, backward chapters, and two pigs under a blanketBeekeeping runs through the novel as both literal subject and recurring metaphor, and Picoult researched it with the same primary-source commitment she brings to courtroom procedure or medical ethics in other books. The pandemic made access difficult: she has asthma and spent the first fifteen months of COVID largely housebound. She found a workaround.
I went out every weekend to a master beekeeper’s field in Vermont. I would basically study what he was doing from six feet away with a mask on underneath my beekeeping helmet.
Lily, the teenage girl at the center of the mystery, is dead by the end of chapter one. Her chapters run backward in time, from the day she died to the September she arrived in town. Picoult later noticed that the structural choice had carried meaning she had not fully planned: it turned out to mirror the book’s own argument about the past.
going backwards in time metaphorically is also kind of the message of the book, that idea that how much does the past get to inform our present. [paraphrased from audio]
Picoult is a committed outliner; Boylan prefers to write toward discovery. The collaboration required one of them to concede, and the book’s genre made the answer clear before they argued about it.
When you’re writing a courtroom drama and a murder mystery, you can’t get to the end of that and go, I don’t know who did it — you actually have to have a plan.
Once chapters were drafted, the two authors edited each other’s work so aggressively that the question of who wrote any given sentence became genuinely unanswerable. Picoult described the result not as a blend but as something closer to a merger, which she framed as both a creative achievement and a strange personal disorientation.
Jenny would give me a chapter of hers. I would edit my way very heavily through it, and she would do the same thing with mine to the point where now when I look at the book, it is very hard for me to tell which phrase Jenny wrote and which phrase I wrote because we really did get dirty in each other’s sandboxes, so to speak.
The merger had a cost. Co-authorship, she concluded, produced not half the labor of a solo novel but nearly double it, with two voices that had to be reconciled at every seam.
Picoult’s summary of what co-authorship actually required, stripped of any romanticizing, is the line she returns to most often when asked about the collaboration. It is also the most efficient description of what can go wrong when two novelists share a single narrative thread.
It takes almost twice the work to make sure that the narrative thread feels continuous, rather than two pigs fighting under a blanket.
What she wants us to sit with
The difference between a secret and a private thingPicoult has a precise two-part definition that sits at the center of almost every moral question the novel raises. Every character in the book is concealing something, and she wants readers to place their own concealments into one category or the other before they finish.
The difference between what is secret and what is private, in my mind...is the idea of shame. Something that you keep secret is usually something you’re afraid to tell someone. Something you keep private is really something that’s just yours that may not be anyone else’s business.
Picoult has spoken explicitly about Mad Honey as a companion to her earlier novel Small Great Things, which she wrote for white readers as an entry point to conversations about race. She sees this book performing the same function for cisgender readers encountering transgender experience. What she wants from that encounter is not information transfer but something more involuntary.
Our hope is that what Mad Honey will do will force you if you’re cisgender to question your assumptions. It’s going to give you a vocabulary so that you can have a conversation... That’s the great trick that stories can do. That they can — you find your heart opened against your will. And it’s very different than having a newscaster throw facts and figures at you. [paraphrased from audio]
When the book generated hate mail from readers who felt the jacket had not warned them that a character was transgender, Picoult says she wrote back to all of them. Her reply to the charge that the book was “woke” became one of the clearest statements of what she believes fiction is actually for.
There’s nothing radical about kindness. There’s nothing radical about being generous and curious about other people’s experience of being human. There’s nothing radical about love. Although, actually...maybe there’s nothing more radical than love. [paraphrased from audio]
In a Good Morning America appearance, Picoult connected the backlash against Mad Honey to the broader campaign of book banning underway at the time of the book’s 2022 publication. She did not treat the two phenomena as separate: she sees them as the same reflex.
Books are being banned today not because they’re bad books, but because they do inspire thought and conversation and empathy. And for a lot of people that’s terrifying because it tears down the walls of your echo chamber. [paraphrased from audio]