Jodi Picoult Reveals the Details and Cover of Her New Novel, "Wish You Were Here": Exclusive
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#1 New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult had already completed a new novel that was set to come out in 2022, but while isolating at home in New Hampshire with her husband, Tim, she read a news story that resonated with her. It involved a man from Japan—Jesse Katayama—who visited Peru as a tourist in March of 2020 and got stuck there for six months when the lockdown hit. By the time travel restrictions were at last lifted and he was able to book a flight home, Machu Picchu, one of the seven wonders of the modern world and the entire reason for Katayama's trip, remained closed. The tourist would have had to return home without ever seeing it had locals not intervened, appealing to the Culture Ministry to open the historic site for one day so Katayama could visit.
And that's how the idea for Wish You Were Here came to Picoult, a process she shares exclusively with Oprah Daily. Now the novel's being crashed onto her publisher's schedule and will arrive in bookstores on November 30 of this year.
The novel's protagonist is Diana O'Toole, a New Yorker who works at Sotheby's and seems to have things all figured out. She and her doctor boyfriend, Finn, are about to visit the Galapagos together to celebrate her 30th birthday when a virus hits, and Finn is forced to stay back to work overtime at the hospital; he urges Diana to make the trip anyway, which she does. But as luck—or Mother Nature—would have it, by the time she gets there the virus has become a pandemic, and everything shuts down. Kate must rely on the kindness of strangers and her own ability to live outside her comfort zone to get through the crisis.
Picoult tells Oprah Daily that because she has asthma she was especially careful to stay at home during the pandemic. "For fifteen months I went nowhere," she says, "and for the longest time I had difficulty wrapping my brain around what was happening and what we were going to learn about ourselves from COVID-19." But hearing Katayama's story " was like turning a key in a lock—suddenly I knew how to write about the pandemic, and the story exploded out of me. I decided to riff on the tale of someone who's stuck in what we would consider paradise when the rest of the world is falling apart."
The only remaining problem was that Picoult wasn't under contract for the book, and at first was unsure whether or not she was on to something successful. So she shared the idea with other writer friends, who encouraged her to keep going. In conducting research for the book, she actually stumbled upon a man from Scotland who'd been stranded in the Galapagos for eight months during the pandemic, and got to know him through a series of interviews. After giving the completed novel to " a couple of people to beta-read," Picoult says, "their reactions were strong enough that I knew I had something."
Picoult feels that while many people aren't ready to read about how we survived a pandemic—or in so many cases, lost loved one during COVID—she intends Wish You Were Here to offer "the collective hug we couldn't have last year, validating everything we've lived through, everything we've lost, everything we've learned.
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