Jodi Picoult Slams Sexist Nature of the Publishing Industry

Best-selling author Jodi Picoult has lashed out at the publishing industry this week claiming that it brands the majority of female-authored books as chick-lit, regardless of the subject matter.  The 48-year-old appeared to suggest that the industry was extremely sexist towards women and was unhappy with the fact that women's books are dressed up with "pink fluffy covers". “I write women’s fiction,” she told The Telegraph. “And women’s fiction doesn’t mean that’s your audience. Unfortunately, it means you have lady parts. “If a woman had written One Day (by David Nicholls), it would have been airport fiction,” she continued. “Look at The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. If I had written that, it would have had a pink fluffy cover on it. If Jenny Eugenides had written it, it would have had a pink fluffy cover on it. “What is it about? It’s about a woman choosing between two men. What is The Corrections about by Jonathan Franzen? It’s about a family, right? And I’m attacking gun control and teen suicide and end-of-life care and the Holocaust, and I’m writing women’s fiction? “I mean, I can’t tell you. When people call The Storyteller chick-lit, I actually break up laughing. Because that is the worst, most depressing chick-lit ever.” Jodi is currently promoting her new book 'Leaving Time'.  She went on to explain that she had even decided to write under a male pseudonym at one stage, but that her agent was told the book was too “well-written for the male romance genre”. “I was so angry about these men who had co-opted a genre that women had been slaving over for years. There are some really phenomenal romance writers who get no credit, who couldn’t even get a hardback deal. And there men waltzed in and said, ‘Look what we can do. We can write about love. And we are so special’. And that just made me crazy,” she said after adding, “Please don’t get me started on Nicholas Sparks.”