Why I Wrote Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult

As a mom of three, I've seen my own children struggle with fitting in and being bullied. It was listening to their experiences, and my own frustrations, that led me to consider the topic of school shootings. I also kept thinking about how it's not just in high school where we have this public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside...everyone wonders if they're good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It's an archetypical moral dilemma: do you act like yourself, and risk becoming an outcast? Or do you pretend to be someone you're not, and hope no one finds out you're faking?

This book was VERY hard to research. I actually began through my longtime legal research helper, who had a colleague that had worked in the FBI and put me in touch with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office -- the people who investigated the Columbine shootings. I spoke with them, and they sent me DVDs and material that had never been made available to the public, which helped a bit to get into the mindset of the shooters. The next contact I made was with a woman who served as a grief counselor to the families who lost children at Columbine. However, I really wanted to talk to a school shooting survivor...and yet I didn't want to cause anyone undue pain by bringing up what will always be a difficult subject. I was actually in Minneapolis, doing a reading, when the Red Lake shootings occurred. It was the most surreal feeling: there I was in a hotel, writing a scene in the book, and on the TV next to me was a reporter saying exactly what I was typing into my fiction. I went to the bookstore event that night and was telling folks about the way my two worlds had collided...and a woman came up to me afterward. She knew someone who'd survived the Rocori shootings in MN and was willing to put me in touch with her. Through that connection, I not only spoke with two teachers who shared with me their story of the shooting...but also a young man whose friend died that day. It was his commentary that shook me the most -- as a writer and a parent -- and that became the most important research I did for this book.

Although the media is quick to list the "aberrant" characteristics of a school shooter, the truth is that they fit all teens at some point in their adolescence! Or in other words -- these kids who resort to violence are not all that different from the one living upstairs in your own house, most likely -- as scary as that is to imagine. Two other facts that surprised me: for many of these shooters, there is the thinnest line between suicide and homicide. They go to the school planning to kill themselves and decide at the last minute to shoot others, too. And that, psychologically, a single act of childhood bullying is as scarring emotionally as a single act of sexual abuse.

It is always hardest for me to write a book that has kids in it close to my kids' ages -- and Nineteen Minutes does. I think that every parent has probably experienced bullying in some form -- either from the POV of the bully or the victim -- so it's a pretty universal subject. But in many ways, watching my children as they struggled to find their own place in the social hierarchy of school did make them guinea pigs for me, as I was writing the book. I know that many of my readers are the age of the young characters in this book, and over the years, some have written me to ask if I'd write a book about bullying. But it wasn't until I began to connect what kids experience in school with how adults treat other adults who are somehow different that I began to piece together the story. Discrimination and difference at the high school level will never end until the adults running these schools can go about their own lives without judging others for their race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. How ridiculous is it that America prides itself on being a melting pot, when -- as Peter says in the novel -- that just means it makes everyone the same?

If I could say one thing to the legions of teens out there who wake up every morning and wish they didn't have to go to school, it would be this -- and I'm saying it as both a mom and a writer: Stay the course. You WILL find someone like you; you WILL fit in one day. And know that even the cool kids, the popular kids, worry that someone will find out their secret: that they worry about fitting in, just like you do.

I see Nineteen Minutes and a previous book of mine, My Sister's Keeper as very similar books -- they are both very emotional, very gut-wrenching, and they're situations that every parent dreads. And like the moral and ethical complications of MSK, you have a kid in Nineteen Minutes who does something that, on the surface, is absolutely devastating and destructive and will end the lives of others. But -- given what these characters have endured -- can you blame them? Do I condone school shootings? Absolutely not. But I can understand why a child who's been victimized might feel like he's justified in fighting back. I also think it's fascinating to look at how two good parents might find themselves with a child they do not recognize -- a child who does something they can't swallow. Do you stop loving your son just because he's done something horrible? And if you don't, do you start hating yourself? There are so many questions raised by Nineteen Minutes -- it's one big gray area to wallow in with your book group!

I'd love to hear from you about this subject and about Nineteen Minutes. Share your thoughts here at http://borders.gather.com and I'll stop by periodically to say hello.  Thanks!