Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name challenges Shakespeare’s sole authorship, citing Amelia Bassano—a literate woman—as a possible collaborator despite his daughters’ illiteracy and unexplained gaps in his biography. Inspired by Elizabeth Winkler’s essay, she blends research from the Folger Library (including Bassano’s 1611 poetry book with Shakespeare’s coat of arms) with modern parallels, like Broadway’s gender bias. Her work, spanning 35+ languages, provokes debate on taboo topics—19 Minutes, banned for a non-graphic date rape scene, reflects her goal to unsettle assumptions. Picoult’s career, from Princeton to Wall Street and teaching eighth-grade English, underscores how rigorous inquiry and discipline fuel fiction that reshapes cultural narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Gene Kranz is the author of this book, Tough and Competent.
He was with NASA from 1960 to 1994, a flight director for a total of 17 missions during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo eras, including Apollo 11, First Man on the Moon, and of course, Apollo 13.
Gene Kranz, we really appreciate you spending some time with us here on C-SPAN.
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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, you know, 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 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 doesn't look at the issue correctly.
I mean, what I actually said was that I think elephants have an emotional, an emotion, an emotional resonance in 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-lit author that I started to track my fan mail, and 50% of my fan mail, I think it was 49%, came from men.
And one of the things he used to do for business insurance every year was to write a Christmas column that was always 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 recoverable.
Yeah, I was working at Solomon Brothers and Commercial Paper, and they hired me to write the bond offering circulars for Standard ⁇ 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 got to support yourself.
You've got to support yourself.
So I actually wound up working for an educational publisher, Alan ⁇ 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 Carol 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 and 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.
Yes.
And you maybe lead the league in books being banned?
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.
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.
So when you're writing a book now, Do you ever think that your style has evolved over the years so that if you went back and read the books you wrote 20 years ago, you'd say, why did I write that or that could be done better or you never do that?
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 to 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 were you one of these people who was an 800 SAT English kind of person and you were really good at that? I was, yes. 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. So did you ever meet Simon Wiesenthal? I did not. Did you write about the hunting for former Nazis? Did you ever do that? And did he inspire you to do that? 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. Now,
you wrote a book about elephants. I did. I mentioned it earlier. 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? Well, I did actually go to some of the elephant sanctuaries that were in the U.S. There's one in Tennessee that I went to. And that was important too because there was an elephant sanctuary element in the book. But I needed to really see these incredible animals,
these matriarchal societies in the wild, which is why I went to Botswana. 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. Is that right? 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. So for that kind of work and research, do you spend one, two, three, four months researching before you start writing? Every book is totally different, but yes, I always do as much research as I can before I begin to write. And so for that book,
it was probably about six months. Now sometimes some writers research, write, research, write, or some just do research and then they write. And you are a complete researcher, then you write? I mean, I would say 85% up front, because I usually know before I write a single word if the book is going to work, right? Because if I'm doing research and it's completely not falling the way I think it's going to, then I'm not going to write that story. That has only happened once or twice in my life. Now, some people who are writers say I write three hours a day,
that's it. Or I write two pages a day, that's it. And when I'm done, those two pages or three hours, I'm done. Is that your style? No. I write, I think, the way I learn to write, Which is in the time I have.
You obviously have children, grandchildren, but do you have other activities? Are you a collector of anything? Or are you, what else? A hiker, tennis player, golfer? I have a very good group of female friends that I will go hiking with. We mostly do it because we just gossip the whole way, which is really fun. But I also, you know, we have the great fortune to live in a beautiful part of America, the Northeast. Let me ask you about that. Many people live in the area they grew up in,
So when we were looking for a place to live, we actually started when I first got married.
Our first house was west of Boston in Sterling, Massachusetts.
We just kept moving further west until we could afford to buy something.
And then when my husband was working at the time, he was working as a sales manager, and we kind of brainstormed, where do we want to live?
And he had had a client.
Dartmouth was one of his clients. And he said, I think you'd really like it up here. And we went and visited. I loved it. I loved the fact that it was a country town. It was a rural area. But because of Dartmouth College, there are arts and hospitals and terrific education and everything that you really want to surround yourself with. You don't feel as isolated. And we decided that's where we wanted to raise our kids. So today, when you are thinking about the remainder of your writing career,
it's going to be in the same genres, right? You're not going to do anything different. No, I mean, the thing I did that is different is about 10 years ago I started writing for theater. And I do love that because it balances novel writing so beautifully. Theater is so collaborative. There are 50 brains working with you on something as opposed to being alone in your office. And I think that really feeds a very different part of my creativity. But they also inform each other. So when I sit down to write a novel,
I'm always looking around like, well, where is everybody with me? But when I'm writing for theater, I can pull from all the years I've written dialogue to be able to create. Have you had shows produced for Broadway yet? The first one that I worked on was an adaptation actually of the YA book series that I wrote with my daughter. It was called Between the Lines,
and it went to the Tony Kaiser Theater off Broadway in 2022, right after COVID, really hard time to be doing theater. Currently, we have two projects that are over in the UK. I'm actually headed to the West End to do a concert version of The Book Thief,
which is an adaptation of Marcus Susak's book. And has Hollywood come calling for any of your books? Oh, yeah. We want to make a movie out of this or that? And what do you say about that? Well, I did have a movie made out of my sister's keeper. It was the worst professional experience of my life. That has a very well-known and shocking ending. And the only thing I said to the studio and the director was that I wanted them to keep the ending. And they promised me they would,
and they did not. And my fans revolted. I revolted. Were you involved in the script writing or? Only in that the writer director was the one. He would call me weekly and he would read me pieces of things he wrote and ask for my help and then he just turned in a script that was different from the one he showed me. And that was not fun. But since then, Because my readers were so upset with the changes, the movie didn't do as well as they thought.
And because I told New Line Cinema it wasn't going to do that well, I was suddenly a savant in Hollywood.
So I've had more experience and more license to be creative with the projects that have come since then.
There's 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.
So for people that don't know how a novel is evolved, let's go through this.
You finish your draft and you turn it into your publisher.
Typically your publisher says...
you have a year to write or nine months or how long do they give you to typically write? The way my contracts look, it's every two years. Every two years. Two years, okay. 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? Oh, absolutely. My editor, Jen Hershey, is the best editor. I love her. 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? I mean, you're assuming he wrote this stuff. Well, he probably wrote most of it, don't you think? Or a lot of it? You don't think he wrote most of it? No, I don't. I think that we would have found by this point something in his hand. And there is one play with Shakespeare's actual handwriting on it, and it's a play that somebody else wrote. Well, if you don't think he wrote most of it, who do you think wrote it? Francis Bacon or? Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford,
Marlowe, I think it was a whole bunch of people. Thomas Kidd, tons of writers who I think were all for different reasons wanted to pay Shakespeare for that name. It was like a collective. And I think people knew back then that if you got a Shakespeare play,
it was like a wink, you know, like we know who William Shakespeare is. It's all these people. And I think we've all lost the joke. Well, we're in the Folger Shakespeare Library, and would you be willing to tell people here that you think Shakespeare didn't write a lot of those? I think he might have written some of the stuff. I think he tried to write. I don't think that he is the,
I don't think he is the religion that people have made him out to be, honestly. Okay, so I was asking about whether somebody edited his work, but let's go back to your work. So the editor comes back and says, all right, here's how some edits, and you go back and forth. Then when the book is done, do you get a certain amount of time you commit to them to go out and talk to people and promote the book a bit? Is that a month or so, two months? Yeah, so I think I'm a rare writer in that I actually am a people person,
and I like going out on the road. I like meeting my fans. I really like talking about my books in public. And so my tours get to be quite extensive. So I will spend, I'll do like a 30-city tour in the U.S., which is quite large. And then I'll go over and do a couple of weeks in England. And then sometimes I'll also wind up in Australia or another country. 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. Nobody ever does that because usually they have to pay for a ticket, so why would you? 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 see these whole generations of families that are reading books together, and I think that's awesome. So what you're most proud of having accomplished as a writer so far is the genre that I say you perfected. Is it just putting out a fair amount of work over many years? Is it having people tell you that they really enjoy and have had their views changed on what you've written? What do you most enjoy and most proud of? I'm most proud of the fact that all of my books are still in print,
which not a lot of authors can say. They never went out of print, like not even the old ones. Even Shakespeare couldn't say that. Right. 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 non-fiction 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? You know,
I don't know. 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. So writers like you are always looking for fresh ideas for new books, presumably. Do you read newspapers religiously? Do you watch television news? What do you do to get fresh ideas all the time? They fall into your lap sometimes,
you know. 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. So who's your toughest critic? Your mother? Oh, none. Your children, your husband, or none of them. They don't criticize you that way. I am my toughest critic at this point. You know, there is something about being a successful writer where I think people just assume, hey, they're going to buy the books anyway.
You can write whatever you want.
And so I don't ever want to phone in a book.
I want to make sure it's the best that I can do at that moment.
And so I am probably harder on myself than anybody else.
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?
what do you do with all these papers? Good question. They are at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They have my archives. And if anyone wants to do their thesis on Jody Pico, that's where you should go. An excellent university. I'm just how did you happen to pick that place? Because my editor for my second book,
Harvesting the Heart at Viking, became an archivist. And she asked me if I would give my archives to them. And how do you come up with the titles for your books? I sometimes have the title in my head when I'm writing it. And sometimes I'm very proud of that title and I send it off as a manuscript to my editor and she goes,
absolutely not. And you need to come up with a new title. And sometimes it's hard. Sometimes they'll throw ideas out. But very much sometimes it's a 50-50 thing. I either know it or I have no idea what to call it. And do you have people you dedicate each of your books to? And is it a big struggle for you to figure out who to dedicate each book to? That's a great question. You know,
sometimes I wonder if my family and friends are like, is this one for me? But at this point, I mean, I have the great fortune of having a lot of support, a lot of friends, a lot of great family. And so I've written enough books too that I've been able to dedicate them to the people I want to. The book that's going to come out in 2026 actually is going to be dedicated to my two grandchildren who are way too young to read it. And you wouldn't dedicate a book to William Shakespeare,
though, right? I'm going to say no. When you write, you write in English. That's your native tongue. Yes. But your books are translated into other languages. And do you ever go overseas to help promote the books? And how many languages have your books been interpreted into or translated into? 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. 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. It's very weird. It's very disconcerting. So very often people that buy books want to have them signed by the author. So you spend a lot of time doing that, signing books. And do you realize why people really want a signature by you? Or do you think it just makes their life better if you actually have the book signed? Well, it does. It actually ups the value, right? So I mean,
I understand that. And I have books that I really value that are first editions signed by the author. So for me, nowadays, what I do is usually do what are called tip-ins. So for example, I had like 33,000 pieces of paper shipped to me by my publisher before by any other name came out. And I had to sign 33,000 pieces of paper and ship them back. And they get bound into the books. So people who buy a book get a signed copy. You know,
it's already signed for them. And even with that, I had to wind up signing an extra. I would do about $1,000 a day. So is it a bad book? Do you have a book or to sign the autographs? No, it's harder to write the book for sure. But you just put on like, you know, reality TV program on your iPad and you just sit there and scrawl that's a challenge. So the pleasure of writing novels for somebody that's thinking of that is what? It's an unsteady, unpredictable income, really,
because you can't be sure every book's going to sell. What is the pleasure of writing novels to you? I cannot imagine anything else I would have rather done with my life. I still am amazed that anyone wants to read anything I want to write. And I know that even if nobody was reading it,
I would still be writing because I couldn't let those stories just sit inside of me. They'd have to come out somehow. It's way more gratifying when people do want to read what you write. But for me, that is the joy is that I actually am one of the luckiest people in this country because I have a job that I absolutely love to do. 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 afterwards, you said, Why did I write that book? Or that's never happened? No, I did have books that didn't sell well, and then 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. So, if you had a chance to interview William Shakespeare and say, Okay, Will, Did you really write this?
And how do you make your mark in history when history is doing everything it can to erase you? So, do you have another person like her you're going to be writing about in the near future? There are people I've thought about, but I haven't got the story for them yet, so we'll have to see. So, the publishing industry is a complicated industry. Some people say it's not a greatest investment in the world because publishers don't make that much money, relatively speaking. It's a complicated business. But, generally, you're okay with the publishing industry. Your publishers have treated you well,
and you're happy with the way the book publishing world works today? For me, yes, it's so different than when I started. 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? You know, but I feel that I worked very hard, but I was also in the right place at the right time. So, what does your husband do now? He's still not at home with your young kids anymore. So, is he doing something else or he's still at home helping you? Oh,
he's absolutely helping me. He makes my life spin. You know, he's the anchor to the kite. And he is currently on Puppy Patrol. We have a new puppy. So, that's taking a lot out of him. But he actually does volunteer work with our state archaeology department in New Hampshire. And he goes out on digs to try to identify and find Native American artifacts in the state. Now,
Hanover is a small town, though, as some people would say, it's a small college. And there are those of us who love it. It's a small town. There are those of us who love it. It's a great place. But you must be one of the more famous people living there. So,
can you go shopping at any place without having people ask you for autographs or something like that? Believe it or not, there was a point where Bill Bryson, Janet Ivanovich, and I all lived in that town together. Isn't that crazy? I think I'm the only one left there now. Nobody bothers you when you go to restaurants or anything. You go shopping. Every now and then someone will come up to me and say, hi, I really like your books. But people, for the most part, are not going out of their way to be nasty in public. You know, and I absolutely, when someone comes and says that to me,
I am always unshowered and in the grocery store and my hair's a rat's nest. But yeah, people are very kind. Congratulations on a great career. It's very impressive. Nice to meet you. And thank you for coming to the Folger Shakespeare Library to do this. Thank you so much. Thank you. Jodi Pico and David Rubenstein viewed artifacts from the Folger Shakespeare Library's archive. Hello,
unidentified
welcome. Hi, how are you? Good. So you see if this is something that rings a bell for you, you know what this is. I've never seen an original of this. But you know what this is. Yes,
this is Amelia's book. Amelia Missana's book. This is her book of poetry. She was the first published female author in England. That's incredible. 1611. Wow. And this is. Did Shakespeare write that for her? I'm going to say no. Wow. To the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty. Yeah. And she had all the prefatory poems,
and they wanted her to cut them because it was too long a book. That's incredible. To all the virtuous ladies in general. So there you have it. And then we get into the real world. And then you get into the good stuff. But so much preliminary material like this so that everybody is properly binding. Well,
really, she just wanted their patronage. Of course. You have to have funders. This is incredible. Oh, this makes me so happy. Excellent. Excellent. There's nothing like seeing the real thing. Yeah,
that's amazing. This particular copy, you can see this binding. This is an 18th century binding, so put on later. And decorated very specifically with Shakespeare's coat of arms with the spear. And this is really nice because in the front of it here is a portrait of Roger Payne,
who is the person who put this binding on. So this is an engraving of him at work. And then also tipped in here is the bill that he wrote for this binding. So it details his process,
the condition he found the book in, and then what he did. That's really cool. Yeah. So that has traveled with this copy now through the centuries. And these pages are from 1623 or the rebound cover. 1623 and then the cover is rebound. You can also see that, you know, this has been taken from a different leaf, inserted. All of these copies over centuries are affected in one way or another by things that have changed. That's the only picture we know of Shakespeare,
really? 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. See more 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 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 Rubenstein. So what's the key to having a happy marriage? The answer is not passionate love, but what we call in my business companionate love. 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,
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