Oct 8, 2026 · 46 min · 12 segments
We’re back and we’re chatting with Jodi Picoult for Banned Books Week! 🚫 The award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Nineteen Minutes and My Sister’s Keeper shares the real reason…
Jodi PicoultGuestJordanHost
I would say that, yes, this was in direct response to, you know, a progressive president, but that's not really necessarily true.
They were mostly motivated by Moms for Liberty, which gave up their assault on masks and isolation during COVID [laughs] to suddenly decide that all these parental consent laws, which were very poorly worded in these conservative states, didn't just say, "I don't want my kid to read this book, so I'm gonna make sure that they're not in class that day or take them out to do a different project." They decided instead that they had the right to tell other people's children what not to read.
The interesting thing about "Nineteen Minutes" is that it is not banned because of a school shooting.
It is banned because of a single page, page 313, in which there is a date rape that is really endemic to the anti-bullying message of the, of the book in, in general, and in particular because I used the word erection, which I guess high school students don't know about.
That...
Okay.
That wasn't the issue.
And you know, so they started, when they began banning books here, at this point, book bans in America are up over 1,100%.
PEN America has, uh, logged over 23,000 individual titles that have been banned.
They started by targeting BIPOC and LGBTQ authors and stories, and then they began to move into what they consider, quote, "mature content," and that's where my books tend to fall.
And so what I find so fascinating is that "Nineteen Minutes" was curriculum in multiple states-
That's what I found to be so con-
I would say that, yes, this was in direct response to, you know, a progressive president, but that's not really necessarily true.
They were mostly motivated by Moms for Liberty, which gave up their assault on masks and isolation during COVID [laughs] to suddenly decide that all these parental consent laws, which were very poorly worded in these conservative states, didn't just say, "I don't want my kid to read this book, so I'm gonna make sure that they're not in class that day or take them out to do a different project." They decided instead that they had the right to tell other people's children what not to read.
The interesting thing about "Nineteen Minutes" is that it is not banned because of a school shooting.
It is banned because of a single page, page 313, in which there is a date rape that is really endemic to the anti-bullying message of the, of the book in, in general, and in particular because I used the word erection, which I guess high school students don't know about.
That...
Okay.
That wasn't the issue.
And you know, so they started, when they began banning books here, at this point, book bans in America are up over 1,100%.
PEN America has, uh, logged over 23,000 individual titles that have been banned.
They started by targeting BIPOC and LGBTQ authors and stories, and then they began to move into what they consider, quote, "mature content," and that's where my books tend to fall.
And so what I find so fascinating is that "Nineteen Minutes" was curriculum in multiple states-
That's what I found to be so con-
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