Pick of the people

Jodi Picoult is asleep on the sofa, Medusa hair splayed out around her. She needs a nap. It is exhausting to maintain her position as the biggest-selling female author for adults in the United Kingdom and many other countries. Writing a string of 500-page novels is only the start of it. For three months a year she tours the world, appearing at every event, interview and signing session that a hyperactive multitasker can cram in.

And here she is, back on her feet to greet me on this, her latest visit from the United States, despite a pounding headache. "It's really nice to get out and meet people," she says gamely, flashing a huge smile.

The Picoult phenomenon is new to me, as to many intellectual snobs who believe that, as she puts it, "something that reaches the masses may not be well written". Until House Rules — her 17th book in as many years — landed on my desk, I had assumed her novels were chick lit-cum-misery memoirs tacked on to a topic of the day — be it teen suicide, brittle bones or saviour siblings.

Multiple perspectives

Reviews of her books on Amazon — she rarely gets attention on literary pages — reveal a loyal following. Readers enjoy the way she reflects multiple points of view, underlining how little we really understand one another. Book clubs love her novels because there is always something to discuss. But there is a common criticism. Her stories can seem formulaic: moral dilemma, several viewpoints, death, court case, twist.

"I can't stand that accusation," she says. "I defy you to find another writer who has written about as many subjects and taken you on as many journeys as I have. John Grisham doesn't get complaints because his books are about the legal system. Maybe it's because I'm a girl."

Picoult, 43, doesn't do self-deprecating. She is an all-American achiever who goes for a 5.30am run and used to write in 15-minute bursts when her three children, now teenagers, were small. I already feel I have met the whole family because pictures of her with them — some gloriously unflattering — are posted on her website, giving the lie to the glamorous publicity shots of Picoult in her slimmer days.

Despite her immense success, the family still lives in a modest house in a small New Hampshire town peopled by academics — the kind of intimate, almost idyllic, place where her novels "about ordinary people in extraordinary situations" are set.

Picoult (pronounced Pee-coe) loves a meaty issue but until now, there haven't been many of them in her own life. She had a happy childhood on Long Island with her mother, a teacher, and father, a stockmarket analyst. She writes well about sibling rivalry but her younger brother is a "great guy". At Princeton, where she studied creative writing, she met her husband, Tim. He was one of the rowers she used to yell at in the boat that she coxed. Is there tension with Tim, who runs the home? Nope. "He likes to be in the shadows."

She seems to have achieved the working mother's Holy Grail of doing both home and work all the better for pulling off a balance between the two. "My writing makes me a better mum and vice versa. When I'm with my children I don't feel distracted by what I wish I was doing and being a mum has made me a better writer because the things I worry about are the things mums everywhere worry about."

Coping with tough times

The only disruption to this Eden occurred several years ago when her middle son, Jake, had benign tumours in his ears that have left him deaf in one ear and in danger of losing hearing in the other. "We don't sit and sob about it every day, but we think about it," she says. Those emotions informed her most successful book to date, My Sister's Keeper. The story about a girl with leukaemia and her bone-marrow donor sibling was her first book to be turned into a film last year.

With research under way for her 2012 book, there is no sign of her pace slackening. But however many books she writes, however many million copies she sells, she still isn't taken seriously in literary circles.

"It's more important for me to reach people and, hopefully, open their minds a little than it is to win prizes," she says, but it clearly riles her.

"What kills me about the whole commercial/literary debate is that what we consider to be the classics were the commercial literature of their day. Shakespeare, Dickens or Austen — they were all widely read. It's a good point, right?"