The tear-soaked pages of a Jodi Picoult novel have been wrung out and turned into a film. Monica Hesse, of The Washington Post, reports that moviegoers should go armed with tissues.
The faces of the audience members leaving My Sister's Keeper have gone all Monet: their features are blurred by a dewy sheen of tears smeared over cheeks and noses, they look fuzzy and far-off, as if they may never see happiness again. Why did we ever come to this movie? Why do we DO this to ourselves?
Inside the dark cinema, tissues had been at the ready since the 15-minute mark, when on-screen a frail toddler received a spinal tap. Gasps of disbelief began around the time a lawyer insinuated that a mother didn't care about her own child.
It was not Transformers.
It was Jodi Picoult.
Picoult, the woman responsible for all these tears, the blockbuster author whose fans call themselves the Pi-cult. Picoult, patron saint of impossible decisions and weepy moral dilemmas, and creator of her own particular breed of horror story best described as Ovarian Gothic - horror not of the supernatural, but of the domestic. Picoult, the woman whose books inspire fierce devotion mixed with pockets of self-loathing. Haven't heard of her? You are such a man.
My Sister's Keeper is the first Picoult novel to be adapted as a feature film.
The fans who trooped into theatres did so not with anticipation, in some cases, but with grim resolve, the same way that they approach her books:
"I don't know why I read her," Katie Gore moaned as she prepared to enter the late show. She's in her 20s, the median age for an audience that appears to span ages 16 to 60.
"When I finished her last book," said Jillian Hooker, "I threw it against the wall."
And then they go into the theatre.
This is what they watch: a child is conceived to be spare parts for her older sister, who is dying of leukaemia. After 11 years of painful procedures, the girl finally balks when her parents want her to give up a kidney.
She sues them for medical emancipation, ripping apart the family, which also includes a neglected brother with a learning disability. The lawyer who takes her case has a debilitating illness, and the judge overseeing the trial is recovering from the sudden death of her own middle-school-age daughter.
This widespread misery is a hallmark of Picoult's novels, which have been released like clockwork almost every year since 1992. In The Pact (1998), two close-as-blood couples must deal with the aftermath when their dating children form a suicide pact in which the son ends up living. Plus: sexual abuse. And: a murder charge. Bonus: borderline marital infidelity.
In Change of Heart (2008), a woman loses her husband to a drunk driver, remarries, then, while pregnant, loses her second husband and young child to the psychopath who murders them when he comes to construct the nursery. This is the first 10 pages.
Later, the condemned killer will return, this time wanting to donate his heart to the woman's second child, who has a congenital heart problem and will probably die without a transplant.
If a Picoult character decides to pop into a store, chances are good the cashier she meets has an incurable illness, a crumbling marriage, an estranged mother and several outstanding parking tickets.
"Sometimes I wonder, what is wrong with me? Why do I do this to people?" says Picoult in a phone interview.
Picoult's most recent book is Handle With Care, in which a mother decides to sue her obstetrician, who is also her best friend, in a "wrongful birth" suit, because the woman's child was born with a horrifying bone disease and four years later she's thinking she should have had an abortion. The woman's other daughter? Bulimic.
Back at the movie theatre, Aley Smith and Arika Pierce prepared to enter a recent screening of My Sister's Keeper. They are sisters, so they anticipated much grieving in the next two hours, although Smith was worried about rumoured changes to the ending. The book closes with an awful, nauseating plot twist. "It has to end that way," she said. Anything less would deny the story its true power of catharsis.
Smith learned that Picoult was interviewed for this story. She had a concerned question: "Did she seem like, well, a happy person?"
She did, in fact. Picoult was warm, and funny, and seems to have an extraordinarily blessed life (helpful husband, close relationship with her three kids), which might help explain rather than contradict her stories: "There's a part of me that believes - completely erroneously - that if you do all the research and put yourself through the wringer of researching something like teen suicide," she said, "then you'll never have to deal with it in your own family."
Picoult's fans may read her for the same reason - as an inoculation against the far-fetched terrors of real life, or as emotional scenario-planning for the unbearable.
It's more likely that she is a permission slip for gut-wrenching emotion. On every page, the subliminal message: go ahead, let it out, no-one's watching.
At the movie theatre, Smith turns to her sister. "Ready?" she asks.
Pierce nods. Thus steeled, they go inside.
