It was interesting as a writer to hear her talk about the amount of time she spends researching a novel, especially since she also happens to be a very engaging and informed speaker.
When she first started speaking, I felt a little uneasy that her talk might engender some adverse comments, but either due to time constraints or the theme of A Spark of Light, questions weren't allowed. All five hundred and fifty of the attendees were encouraged to have their picture taken with the author, an offer I declined because I didn't have the patience to line up for that long.
Picoult's subject was both moving and riveting. Fortunately for me, the only time I almost cried was when she spoke about the shame and secrecy which still surround even legal abortion, much like the shame and secrecy surrounding the mounting and almost daily tales of sexual abuse in the news, though many of these acts took place decades ago. When Picoult did an informal survey of her audience, it turned out that an almost equal number of women who knew somebody who had an abortion also knew somebody who had been sexually assaulted.
As the keeper of the history for many branches of my family, people have shared old stories with me, some of which I have confirmed with the death certificates which are now publicly available in Ontario up through 1946. As a feminist, I have been appalled by the choices some women were forced to make because a man wouldn't stop whatever or because birth control simply wasn't available. This may be why as an ardent reader of fiction, I have also been drawn to two other novels about abortion, though John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates also happen to be two of my favorite novelists.
As far as I’m
concerned, John Irving’s The World
According to Garp is one of the best
books ever written, so of course I read The Cider
House Rules when it was first published in 1985. Although Irving’s opinion was obvious, both sides of
the abortion issue were fairly presented.
The same is
true of A Book of American Martyrs published by Joyce Carol Oates more than thirty
years later in 2017. Presenting unique perspectives, much of Oates's story is told from the points of view of two damaged young girls, one the daughter of an abortion doctor and one the daughter of his killer. Notably neither girl has been damaged by having had an abortion, but more so by the loss of her father and the politics of abortion which have shaped the United States since the procedure was first criminalized in the 1880s. Why in God's name is abortion in the States still a part of anybody's political platform in 2018?
Like Oates's A Book of American Martyrs, Picoult's A Spark of Light begins with a shooting at an abortion clinic. Except for the fact that the subject of abortion is so divisive in the States, I'm not sure why Picoult chose to follow up on Oates's book so soon with a novel on the same topic, so I can only surmise that Spark was largely researched and written when Oates came out with Martyrs. Both Oates and Picoult are extremely prolific, Oates perhaps more so, although there is a generation between the two women and Picoult has a family to help/hinder her. Though her characters are fairly complex and her books are well-written, Picoult is less of a literary writer than Oates. Nevertheless, except for the fact that some people will be reluctant to "like" a book about abortion, Picoult has written a very compelling book (in a backwards fashion which I personally didn't care for) which her fans will adore. I also applaud her for presenting another sane, although of course fictionalized account of the abortion controversy in the States.
