Jodi Picoult explores By Any Other Name, her theory that Amelia Bassano and others may have co-authored Shakespeare’s works, backed by research at the Folger Library, Globe Theatre, and Ashmolean Museum. She argues male-dominated narratives erased women’s contributions, from 16th-century playwrights to modern Broadway. Picoult’s banned books—like 19 Minutes—spark conservative backlash, yet her 35+ translated works stay in print, proving enduring reader impact. Her archives at UMass Amherst and global reach underscore how fiction reshapes history and perspective. [Automatically generated summary]
A couple companies we visited yesterday and others I've seen, I mean what AI is doing to 10, 100, 1,000x, the speed of sensing, everything we do on the modern battlefield is critical.
But autonomy is, we see it in Ukraine, we see it out where we're learning from that, the Army's learning from that, is a huge part of the way of the future.
America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation.
From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
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Now from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., a best-selling author with more than 40 million books in print, whose novels include The Storyteller, 19 Minutes, and her latest by any other name, Jodi Pico.
Folger Shakespeare Library is the largest repository of Shakespeare's works, even though it's in the United States.
And there are first folios, roughly 235 first folios.
82 of them are at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
And the relevance of that is that Jodi Picot has just written a new book about the possibility that Shakespeare may not have written all of his works and that maybe a woman actually wrote some of those works.
So can you describe why you think that and how you came about that theory and why you wrote a book about it?
So I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was an English major in college.
And what did I love about Shakespeare?
Nobody wrote women the way the Shakespearean plays did.
Beatrice and Portia and Rosalind and Kate were so three-dimensional.
And I absolutely loved the richness of those female characters.
And when I was in college, I had a professor who spent all of 30 seconds talking about the authorship question and whether Shakespeare actually wrote them.
And like every other English major, I was like, oh, well, that's ridiculous.
Of course he did.
And I didn't think about it for years.
And then I was reading an article by Elizabeth Winkler in The Atlantic in which she was talking about the authorship question.
And she pointed out that Shakespeare had two daughters that survived through childhood.
And he taught neither of them to read or write.
And it literally just stopped me in my tracks.
And I thought, there is no way the same guy who created those incredible female characters would not have taught his own daughters how to read and write.
And I decided to follow this deep dive that Elizabeth did.
I had heard about a lot of male authorship candidates, you know, from Christopher Marlowe to Francis Bacon to the Earl of Oxford, but I had never heard of Amelia Bassano, who is the one that Elizabeth talked about in this essay.
And the more that I dove into Amelia's life, the more I realized that all the gaps that academics have tried to twist Shakespeare's life together to fit were seamlessly filled by Amelia's life.
And I started to think that there was a very good chance that she possibly could have had something to do with the writing of some of those plays.
So this is something you've done before, which is you do a lot of research and then you write a novel that deals with often a complicated social subject.
Here, not that complicated, but it's unusual in the sense that most people think Shakespeare wrote the plays himself.
If he didn't write them, probably another man wrote them.
Yeah, but this, I would argue and say there is a bigger context here.
To me, this is a novel about how women have been written out of history by the men who were holding the pen and how that's not something that just happened in the 1500s.
And so when you start writing a book, you come up with an idea.
Very often there, as a fiction writer, you're not obligated to do a lot of research.
Some fiction writers say, look, I kind of make it up as I go along, but that's not your style.
So you do a lot of research, and then after you do the research, you come up with an interesting premise, but the premise is designed to get people to think about the social subject you have in mind.
So in this case, it is that women deserve better credit for some of the things that were done in that era than they were given.
Yes, and today, because the other half of this book follows the very fictional descendant of Amelia Bassano, who has written a play about her ancestor and is moving in the Broadway community, which happens to be a very kind of patriarchally based male-dominated world.
And she also cannot get her words in front of the public.
And so just as I suggest that Amelia paid William Shakespeare for the use of his name in order to see her words on the stage, I question whether this fictional descendant might do the same just to get her words on the stage.
So if your theory proved to be correct and someday maybe we could prove it through artificial intelligence or something, would you think better of Shakespeare because he was smart enough to use a woman or less of Shakespeare because he actually didn't tell the truth that he was using a woman?
Now, you have invented a genre, I guess I would say, invented it, which is to take a socially complicated subject.
It could be gender equality, it could be reproduction, reproductive rights, whatever it might be, and you write a novel about it to try to bring out the point that maybe society isn't looking at the issue correctly.
I mean, what I actually said was that I think elephants have an emotional, an emotion, an emotional resonance and a cognitive sense that we usually don't attribute to animals.
And they also really, you know, elephants never forget, they really do hold grudges for you.
I say I have to write the worst chick lit ever, because chicklet is also usually fluffy and something you want to read on the beach, and that is definitely not my kind of book.
But also, I was so tired of being called a chick-let author that I started to track my fan mail, and 50% of my fan mail, I think it was 49%, came from men.
He's an excellent writer, and one of the things he used to do for like business insurance every year was to write a Christmas column that was always like along the lines of Clement Moore.
And he used to come to me and we would write these together.
And I have to tell you, it's very hard to rhyme the word reinsurance for coverable.
Yeah, I was working at Solomon Brothers and Commercial Paper, and they hired me to write the bond offering circulars for Standard and Poor's and Moody's.
And there was a point where I knew more about fiat than like anyone on the planet.
Because, you know, my mom was still saying, you've got to support yourself.
You've got to support yourself.
So I actually wound up working for an educational publisher, Alan and Bacon, and I was hired to be a business textbook editor with my massive three months of experience in the business world.
And I used to do all my editing in the morning and then close my door and pretend to be very busy and instead write my novel.
And I did that for a couple of years.
Then I worked for a one-person advertising agency.
I was writing copy and at the same time I was getting a master's in education.
I mean, I've known writers who have full-time jobs and get up at four in the morning, write for two hours a day before they go on and do their employee jobs.
And I think that if you are a writer, you can't not write.
All right, so you write the first book, and then you decide, this is what I can do.
And so when did you come up with the genre that we describe where you find an interesting social subject that has some complications between people having different views on it and decide to write a book about that subject?
I would actually argue that that probably came in with the second book.
The first book, you know, they tell you to write what you know.
And I really didn't know anything when I was starting out.
I had a very happy childhood.
I wasn't walking around in a cloud of angst like a lot of writers.
You know, I tend to be a pretty sunny individual.
And so my first book was really about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, which I did know.
Very fictional, not at all my life, but that was where I centered the first book.
The second book was really about a woman who has a baby and can't handle it and winds up leaving to figure out who she is before she comes back to be a mother.
And it was really about postpartum blues, which nobody even called postpartum blues at the time.
My third book was about domestic violence.
So I think that by the time I was already doing my second and third book, I was already diving into these issues.
But you sound awfully normal, whereas some of the great fiction writers, you know, Hemingway or others, they're either drinking too much or they have terrible relations with their children or their parents, but you don't have any of these problems.
And that's an important distinction because the reason I was able to get to this level was because of my husband, who gave up a lot so that he at one point became the primary stay-at-home dad.
But when my kids were very tiny and I was the primary caretaker, I would write in any 10-minute burst I could find.
If Barney was on TV, if they were napping, I used to take my laptop to kindergarten, a nursery school pickup.
I go to my office, I take my coffee with me, which my husband makes, and then I go upstairs and I pull up whatever I've been writing and I edit my way through the chapter.
And when I get to the bottom of it, I start writing fresh.
Let's suppose you write for a couple days and then do you ever show it to your husband, your children, anybody, your mother, anybody, and say, what do you think?
What I usually do, it depends on the book, but very often if I finish a section, if it's in three sections or something, I will send pages off to my agent, my long-term agent, she's the only agent I've ever had, and my mom, because they give me different kinds of feedback.
I also have a couple of friends who are writers who are beta readers for me, which is really helpful because sometimes you're so in a book that you lose clarity.
And it's important to get a bigger picture, I think, while you're writing it.
Now your books attract a fair amount of readers, but they also attract a fair amount of commentary from people who don't like some of the things that you write.
So, you know, book bans have increased 1,100% since 2020.
They mostly started to increase because of parental rights laws that have been passed in some conservative states that have been misinterpreted so that parents believe that if they object to a certain book, it should be removed from a school shelf or a library shelf.
And, you know, it's one thing as a parent, I'm a parent, to monitor what your kids read.
It's another thing entirely to monitor what other people's kids read.
And that's kind of, therein lays the problem.
That's why we're seeing huge swaths of books being removed from these states.
You know, I have amazing fans and readers, and usually they do that for me.
The reason 19 Minutes is banned, 19 Minutes happens to be about school shootings and gun violence in America.
And you would think that might be a contentious issue, but that's not the problem with the book.
The problem, apparently, is one page where there is a date rape scene that is not graphic and is not gratuitous and is 100% part of the commentary about bullying that is baked into the book.
But that is what these parents and particularly the group Moms for Liberty was objecting to with that book.
I think the only thing you have to do is be a reader first because you really want to know how your stories, the stories that you need to tell, are going to fit into the canon somehow.
And I also think you need to take a writing workshop course.
Does not have to be at Princeton, does not even have to be at a college.
They offer them at libraries and at online and at bookstores.
The reason I suggest taking a workshop course is because you learn how to write on demand and you learn how to give and get criticism.
And those are probably the most important tools a writer has.
When I started out, you know, I told you three people bought my hardcover for my first book.
And eventually, a later publishing company, Simon ⁇ Schuster, bought the rights to all my earlier hardcovers and said, we're going to release these in paperback.
If you want to make any changes, you go right ahead.
And I was like, oh, do I do that?
And I went and I read through all of them.
And there were definitely changes that I would have made in terms of technique.
As I think I've become a more skilled technical writer.
For example, what might have taken me a paragraph to describe when I was writing and I was 23, I now could do in five words.
But I stood by the stories, I stood by the characters, I stood by the plots.
I thought those were all, they absolutely still worked me.
There were so many people in my life that encouraged me to write.
From my mother, who gave me that reality check, but has been my biggest cheerleader my whole life, to Mary Morris, who really whipped me into shape at Princeton and made me the writer that I am today, to the readers who were willing to follow me, even when I was writing very different books each time around.
I think that there are so many influences on me, and even the writers I loved, that I read as a reader before I was a writer who inspired me and made me want to do something just as great.
Alice Hoffman was one of my favorite writers and I love that I get to talk to her now as a friend.
So have you ever kept up with any of your high school classmates who and do they say we always knew you were going to be a great writer or are they sure?
Yeah, I mean I have a group of high school friends who I think would have told you that they could totally see me being a writer.
I had a high school teacher who wound up becoming the principal in the district and then the superintendent and his name was Mr. Eamon and he absolutely encouraged me to write and told me I could do it.
He even sent me off to college with, ironically, posters of Shakespeare quotes.
Yeah, it was actually, so that book was a really interesting, to me, a departure because I had been writing a lot about things that I was afraid of as a parent, you know, like your child getting sick, your child getting kidnapped, things like that.
And then my kids kind of made it through childhood, and I was like, okay, good.
And I began to, I think, broaden my scope.
And the storyteller, which is the book you're talking about, was really about the nature of good and evil.
And I wanted to ask the question: if you were a good person, is there something that could convince you to do something truly evil?
And if you've done something truly evil, is there anything that could erase that stain?
And that honestly was where that story came from for me.
So I actually wound up shadowing a guy at the Department of Justice whose job it is to go after former Nazis.
Have you ever thought they have, like in Florida, kind of an animal country safari where you can just go in Florida and you don't have to go all the way to Africa to see the elephants?
Do you ever think about doing that as opposed to going all the way to Africa?
So we write in your book, I think, that these elephants go back and look at the bones of elephants that have died, and they can kind of sense that this was their cousin or something like that.
Yeah, well, what they do is they'll go back to a spot where an elephant died, and if there are bones there, it's really wild.
They'll pick them up, but their trunks very sensitively go like this.
Sometimes they'll rub their feet very gently over them.
And even if there are no bones, but they know an elephant died there, they will go back there like annually and just kind of pay their respects, just like we would.
One famous writer, I can't remember if it was Faulkner or Fitzgerald, who said that when you're writing for movies, basically you throw the script over the fence, they throw money back over the fence to you, and that's it.
But the reality is that if they feel that you can contribute in a way that is going to be useful and viable to them, then they'll let you, if you're lucky, contribute in some way.
You turn the draft in, and then since you've sold so many copies of your books already, does somebody have the courage to say, Well, let me edit your work?
And I think it's, sometimes I think she cares more than I do.
I mean, she really gets so passionate about my books and really wants them to be the best they can be.
Like I said, sometimes you get too close to material, especially when you're writing for nine months, you know, and you don't realize how, I guess, caught up in the details you are, that you can't see that big picture.
And Jen is a master of that, and I rely on her to be able to look at something with baby eyes and help me shape it.
Do you imagine that Shakespeare had an editor and somebody said, Well, you're not really doing such a good job, Will, and we're going to edit your work?
So when you go on these tours, how many people come up to you and say, I knew you in high school, or my daughter knew you at some point in high school, or something?
Do you have people that have personal connections?
Or how many people come up to you and tell you, I don't really like your work.
I just came here to tell you I don't like your work.
Usually they have to pay for a ticket, so why would you?
They don't do that.
But I have had a couple of people come up to me and be like, do you remember me?
I was in your third grade class.
But most people are, what I actually love is when people come up to me and say, I started reading your books when I was 14, and now this is my daughter, and I have her reading all your books.
And, you know, you see these whole generations of families that are reading books together, and I think that's awesome.
And I'm also really proud of the fact that I think people, People tell me very often that a book saved their life at a time when they needed it.
And I think that when we write fiction, we don't expect to have that kind of impact on someone, but every now and then you do.
And it's not just one or two readers, it is hundreds have come up to me with stories of their own lives and how my books intersected with them.
And I really do believe that the last piece of an equation when it comes to a book is the reader, what they bring to the story and what they take away from it.
And that is honestly, what a gift to know that you helped someone when they needed it.
Now, one of the great nonfiction writers in our country is Robert Caro, who's written a book on Robert Moses, and also now four volumes and maybe a fifth on Lyndon Johnson.
He wrote a book not long ago on how he writes.
Would you ever consider writing a book about how to write?
I feel like if I were going to write anything like that, it would probably be a compendium of all the research that I've done and the stories I have from doing all the research.
I think a book on writing is useful only in so much as you have to be able to figure out what works for you because every writer is different and every writer writes differently.
And, you know, so Stephen King's on writing is an incredible masterclass in writing, but you may not take every lesson from there and apply it to yourself in a way that's healthy or helpful.
So rather than telling people this is the only way to do it, I would rather, I think, inspire them with the joy that I've had in my writing and hope that they can find that somehow in theirs.
I mean, I do, I'm definitely a student of the news and of politics and of really, there's no shortage of contentious topics right now in the world.
So I don't think I have to worry about that anytime soon.
But I don't say I go into reading a paper or watching the news looking for the next hook because very often it has to hit me at the right point in my life for me to want to write about it.
Does anybody ever call you and say, I have a great idea for a book and you have to be polite to them or sometimes you say, hey, that is a great idea and actually you take the idea.
Well, so interestingly, both of those have happened.
I can't tell you how many emails I get from people saying, my life would be a great book and I want you to write it.
And I always say, I always write back, I write everybody back, and I say, you know, thank you so much for thinking of me.
I don't take on story ideas.
I have so many of my own.
But that said, if this is the story you want to write, you should do it.
And here are some ways to get started, right?
So encourage them to tell their own story.
But that said, there have been people sometimes when I'm in the middle of organizing a book and trying to figure out research where someone writes to me and says, you know, I really am hoping you'll write about this topic.
This is how my life was affected by this topic.
And I'm like, you are exactly who I need to talk to.
And so I've wound up with, you know, Prison Pen Pals because of that.
And very often, I use their stories, the lives of the people who have walked through these situations in my books in a way that I haven't, so that I can write with authority about a character.
And when you are writing, let's say you write one day and you finish it, you go back the next day and look at it, and you say, oh my God, who could have written this?
I think it's like around 35 or 40 languages that they've been translated into.
I certainly haven't gone to all those countries, but I've done book tours in Germany, I've done book tours in Italy, in France.
They're very disconcerting because I don't speak those languages fluently.
And some I don't speak at all.
And so I remember being in Italy and Rome doing morning TV and completely unable to communicate which TV program I was on.
And you know, there's someone in your ear translating as the anchor is talking to you and you're trying not, then you're speaking in English, but you hear the translation.
So your books sell extremely well and every one that I'm aware of has sold well, but you ever write one that just was a clunker and just didn't work and afterward just said, why did I write that book?
And then, you know, I thought there was a point where I actually almost got out of writing.
It was like my fourth book.
Book didn't sell well at all.
And I went and I got an application for Home Depot.
I thought maybe this is what I should be doing.
And I found out later, as I switched publishing companies, that it had been caught in a major war between an editor and the head of the company who were feuding with each other.
And the sales director came up to me and said, we were told not to bother trying to sell this book.
I mean, there's all kinds of politics that goes on that you don't know about as an author.
And so I did go back to writing and I had a more successful book and I kept at it.
You know, self-publishing didn't exist when I started writing, and now there are so many authors that are doing that or doing independent publishing, which is kind of a hybrid.
And that's a very different world from what I do.
I like being in traditional publishing.
I like having an army behind me to market my books, to put the books together physically and, you know, in terms of getting them out in the world.
But there are so many avenues now to publishing.
So yeah, I am quite happy with the route I've taken.
I don't know if I started writing now, if I would even be published.
Who's to say?
But I feel that I worked very hard, but I was also in the right place at the right time.
That's the only picture we know of Shakespeare, really?
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This is the only picture where there's some reason to believe that people who knew him and worked with him were involved in the creation and the approval of that image.
Seymour with Jodi Pico and the Folger Shakespeare Library's artifacts on America's book club, The Treasures.
Available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday, December 14th, with our guest best-selling author, Arthur Brooks, who has written 13 books about finding purpose, connection, and peace.
and cultivating lasting joy.
His books include Love Your Enemies, Build the Life You Want with co-author Oprah Winfrey and his latest The Happiness Files.
He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader, David Rubinstein.
The answer is not passionate love, but what we call in my business, companionate love.
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Companionate love, which is best friendship.
You know, I told my kids that, who are now, you know, two of my kids are young married, and my son Carlos said, companionate love, that's not hot.
And I said, well, trust me, it's got some hotness to it.
Watch America's Book Club with Arthur Brooks.
Sunday, December 14th at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.
Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, former NASA flight director Eugene Kranz shares stories from his 34-year career beginning with the Mercury program through the space shuttle era, including his work on landing men on the moon in 1969.
Dale Armstrong then flew the spacecraft searching for a landing point, and we were counting on seconds of fuel remaining.
Normally, we landed with about two minutes of fuel, 120 seconds.
But my controller has now started counting 60 seconds.
And then pretty soon it was 45 seconds.
Then it was 30 seconds at about the time that we said 15 seconds we recognized the crew had just landed.
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Eugene Kranz with his book Tough and Competent tonight at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q ⁇ A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.