Fairytale ending as family link-up casts spell on readers

So you might think that, in writing a fairytale for young adults with her 16-year-old daughter Samantha Van Leer, the American whose adult fiction sells by the million is going a little soft. Think again. Between the Lines is not your run-of-the-mill story, as it involves a fairytale prince called Oliver trying to escape the pages of a book and making contact with Delilah, a 15-year-old loner who is shunned by most of her classmates and has become obsessed with the book in which the prince appears.

It’s far removed from the young adult fiction world of vampires and werewolves popularised by the Twilight series. Mother and daughter are aiming for a slightly younger target audience, aged eight upwards.

Jodi credits Sammy with the idea, although Jodi’s name is in bigger print on the front cover. Sammy is all too aware that some might accuse her of nepotism.

“I know that her name has definitely helped me in this,” she says. “She already had an agent, so we didn’t need to find me one. But I know that we wrote this book together, so I’m not worried.”

Indeed, Sammy thought of the idea when she was daydreaming in a French class three years ago. The collaboration resulted in two years of weekends, school holidays and evenings spent side by side, crafting the story.

“We took turns typing and literally spoke every sentence out loud,” Jodi recalls. “I learned that if you think it’s hard to get your daughter to clean her room, it’s even harder to get her to stay focused on finishing a chapter when it’s nice outside.”

But they didn’t have many creative differences while they worked on the novel. “We argued, politely, about the simple stuff, like whether Oliver should have black hair or blond hair – and I won that argument,” says Jodi.
“Sammy wanted the fairytale sections to be dark and creepy and gothic, but I wanted them to be light-hearted and sort of Shrek-like. She said absolutely not.
“I thought, ‘I’ll let her write it that way, then I’ll fix it’, but she was right.”

While all this was going on, 
Jodi was also busy with a solo writing venture, on the Holocaust. “It was a real challenge because the adult book I was writing was very dark and depressing, so to have to shift between that and Between The Lines was like whiplash.”

Writing together has brought the pair closer and has given Sammy a greater understanding of what her mother does for a living.

“I always watched her just go up into her office and, eight hours later come back down. I never really knew what she was doing. And after living through it I know how hard she works.”

Jodi, 46, a mother-of-three from New Hampshire, goes into a different, darker world from her happily-married, affluent ‘school mom’ life when she writes her adult novels. Her office overlooks Moose Mountain at the large colonial-style family home set in 11 acres.

Sammy recalls the hours her mother would spend up in that office when she was younger, but she didn’t begrudge the time she spent working.

“I guess I always saw the glamorous side of her life. On her book tours all I saw were her fans and the big events and the dinners. I never saw how much she was working, all the plane rides.”

Jodi, who won the Richard & Judy Best Book award in 2005 for her novel My Sister’s Keeper, had a blissfully normal childhood herself.

She was born on Long Island, New York to a mother who was a nursery school teacher and father who worked on Wall Street.

After studying English and creative writing at Princeton University, she had a succession of jobs – in finance, editing textbooks, teaching and writing advertising copy – while writing in her spare time.

She married college sweetheart Tim Van Leer, an antiques dealer, and gave up work to look after their three children when they were small.

She fitted the writing in during the evenings. She found an agent after hundreds of rejections and her books were a slow burn, receiving attention by word of mouth. It wasn’t until her fifth or sixth book that she became noticed in America and it was with My Sister’s Keeper that she found fame in Britain.

Could this collaboration 
with Mom be the start of an illustrious writing career for Sammy? “I heard my mom say earlier that the next thing I’m going to write will be my college application,” she laughs. “But we have talked about a sequel.”

Between The Lines by Jodi Picoult & Samantha Van Leer is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99. To order call 01748 821122. Postage costs £2.85.