Jodi Picoult, who has fifteen novels and three children to her credit, was born and raised - happily - on Long Island. Her novels, which all centre on what it means to love someone, have come out in rapid-fire succession. Picoult studied creative writing at Princeton but when she graduated she headed not for the word processor, but for Wall Street, and followed that with stints at a textbook publishing company and an ad agency. She also taught creative writing part-time at a high school. She then got her master's degree in education at Harvard, married Tim, found she was pregnant and wrote a thousand page manuscript, which became her first published work, Songs of the Humpback Whale.
