“Mad Honey” Shows How the Secrets We Keep Can Haunt Us

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Christina Harcar: Hello, I'm Audible Editor Christina Harcar, and I have the pleasure today to speak with Jodi Picoult and Dr. Jennifer Finney Boylan, co-authors of the novel Mad Honey. Jodi Picoult is the author of 25 novels, at least a dozen of which have debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and five of them, so far, have been made into movies. Professor Jennifer Finney Boylan has written more than a dozen books, including the bestselling memoir entitled She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders. She's also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and teaches at Barnard.

To sum it all up, listeners, three English majors are going to have a conversation now about Mad Honey. Welcome, Jodi and Jenny.

Jennifer Finney Boylan: Hi.

Jodi Picoult: Thanks.

CH: So, I really enjoyed this novel and this story. I am so excited to have you here to talk about it and to lead our listeners into it. But I like to start with kind of a nerdy question at the top, and I'm going to ask you first, Jenny: How would you describe Mad Honey to a listener in one sentence?

JFB: In one sentence. Jeez, if I could've done that, we would've written a poem instead of a novel. Mad Honey is a novel of suspense about the secrets we keep from each other and from ourselves. How did I do, Jodi? Is that good?

JP: Yeah, you did really, really well. You're hired.

CH: Well, that's a great segue into my next question, which is, can you talk about how you decided to work together and how you did work together?

JP: Yeah. So, I am on Twitter and I have a lot of what I would call Twitter friends, who are the people that I follow and whose work I admire but who I've never actually met in person. And one day I woke up and Jenny Boylan, whose work I had read for many, many years, had tweeted that she had a dream, saying that we'd written a novel together. I wrote her back and I said, "Well, what was it about?" And we wound up side-barring and have a little DM conversation. And I was like, "Let's do it."

There are things that I've wanted to write about for a long time, about identity and about how we become who we are, and Jenny and I have very different lived experiences, as women, in this country. And I thought that coming together, we could create something that was really, really unique, and really rich. And so we both were like, "Let's do it. This is awesome." There was actually a great moment where Jenny wrote at the end of this conversation, "I hope tomorrow night I dream that I'm writing a novel with Stephen King." And I wrote back, "Don't we all?!"

"Jenny and I have very different lived experiences, as women, in this country. And I thought that coming together, we could create something that was really, really unique."

JFB: I just want to underline that it is a novel that actually really and truly began as a dream, and the dream was very specific. I mean, usually my dreams are like I don't have any pants and I'm walking around the airport or something. But this dream was, I was writing a novel with Jodi Picoult, there were two voices, a mom and a young woman. The young woman was the girlfriend of the mom's son. And the girl is found dead, and the son is the suspect of the murder. So the mom has to wonder, as evidence mounts against the son, does she trust her son? And that was the dream.

I got up, I got a cup of coffee, and I thought, "That is really specific." So that's why I tweeted it out. And, fortunately, Jodi happened to be online at that moment. So, it really was a dream come true, which just goes to show that that cliché occasionally turns out to be reality.

JP: Also, that it is the only good thing to ever have come out of Twitter.

CH: But it is a great thing. And Jenny's story leads me into something I've been dying to ask. As I was experiencing the story—and I'm a fan of both of you and I have read your work; I have what they call a parasocial relationship, because I read what you do but I don't know you personally—I thought I could feel that Jodi was championing Olivia and that Jenny was kind of championing Lily. And yet the book is a seamless whole. So, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you worked together, and how you got to these two incredible POV voices that pulled me in such that I could not pause.

JP: Great question. It's funny, having written it, I actually think it was twice as much work for us than it would've been had we been writing a novel individually.

JFB: Yeah. When we started out, we were thinking, "Oh, it's only going to be half as much work as writing a regular novel."

JP: Definitely not half the work. So, the way we started was by making a very, very rich outline. And I do outline a lot of my books. And one of the fun things that I learned about myself during this process is that I am an utter control freak.

JFB: She is.

JP: I had to be the keeper of the manuscript. I was driving the boat. But when you have two authors, it can't sound like two pigs fighting under a blanket, right? And so, because of that, we knew that we were going to each take a different narrator. And I was going to take Olivia, like you suggested, and Jenny was going to take Lily. We also knew that we would, at some point, swap a chapter, just to see if readers could tell which chapter we didn't write in our voice.

When we started writing the narrative, since we knew Lily was going to die, literally from the beginning of the book, we're not giving anything away, I thought it would be really interesting if that first chapter was like a fulcrum. After that, Olivia's story goes forward with her son being questioned by the police and eventually being accused of murder. But Lily's story goes backward. We learn how she got to be who she is. And so I said to Jenny, “You're going to write all your chapters in reverse." And she was like, "What?"

Laying it out in an outline was really important, because poor Jenny not only was writing Lily's chapters going backward, but also was writing flashbacks into those chapters. To write without a game plan I think would've been much more difficult. But then, every time that we finished a chapter, we would swap, and we would heavily edit each other's chapters. And that's what I mean about it being twice as much work, because honestly, when I read the book now, it is hard for me to remember what phrase was mine and what phrase was Jenny's. And I know Jenny feels the same way. And I think that's why it feels so much like it came out of one head. Either that, or we truly have merged as human beings. Which is also possible.

JFB: I was looking at the book the other night, and I was reading one of the Lily chapters. And I was thinking, "I don't remember writing this..." This is how deeply we did a Vulcan mind meld together, that we were able, on some level, for Lily's voice to sound different. And I was so amazed by it. And then I remembered, "Oh wait, that's the chapter that Jodi wrote." This is the part of the puzzle that we're going to give some people who want to do the deep dive: Which of the Lily chapters is Jodi's? And which of the Olivia chapters is mine?

CH: As soon as I heard that, I took that as a challenge. So, I wanted to take a little time here to dive into these two characters. And since we were just on the topic of Lily, let's start with her. For listeners who haven't experienced this story, I loved her instantaneously for her deep nerdiness. She's the kind of young woman who knows something about everything, and everything about everything. And I just fell in love with her from the first moment of the story. In her flashbacks, she tells the story of moving to this town called Adams with her mom. And I thought that those portions were really rich and unpausable, because it contrasts her life before her arrival in this town in the action of the book. Jenny, how did it feel for you to write Lily's past and to construct her journal, and to put in that really kind of menacing character of her dad?

JFB: The biggest problem I had in the book was capturing her voice. And I tried a bunch of different ways into the character of Lily. I couldn't get her in part because my own children are now in their late 20s, so I'm 10 years out of teen culture. I really struggled a lot with it. It was the only time in writing the book when I thought, "I'm not going to be able to do this." I said to Jodi, "Couldn't I write the mom?" But Jodi was very helpful. She said, "Try it this way. Try it that way." And finally, what I realized was that instead of making Lily a popular teen, I could make her kind of like the outcast that I was when I was in high school. And I gave her a lot of my passions. She is a know-it-all. She is like Encyclopedia Brown. She plays the cello. She's a fencer.

So, I gave her all of that, and suddenly I began seeing who she could be. And she also surprised me on the page by being this kind of effervescent, buoyant young woman. There's a lot of love in her, in spite of the fact that she's had this very dark life. She's had an abusive father. Her mother essentially scoops her up when she's a child at one point to protect her from the father. And they move to get away from him. And I was wondering what gives her that buoyancy? And in the end, you know where it comes from? It's my own mother, in fact, who had an abusive father, and who lived in poverty, and who had just about the hardest life of anybody I know, and yet was this buoyant, loving person whose motto to the last day of her life was, "Love will prevail." And that's a thing that Lily really believes, that love will prevail, which, in fact, it does, right up until the day that it doesn't, and she's murdered.

JP: The reason that we love Lily, and I defy anyone not to love Lily, is we get to know who she was in retrospect. And that's really important, because knowing who she was, that informs who she became, which is really the whole message of the book.

CH: Yes. So, I want to use that as a jumping off point to get into Asher and Olivia. But first, I can't resist the impulse to make an observation, Jenny. I really truly am a fan of your opinion pieces. And when you mention your mother, I was also very close to my mother, and I had a great mom who believed love was a pass/fail test. And I think she passed it every day. I read your columns about coming out to your mom, and her acceptance, and putting her arms around you. And when you mention her, I get such a warm feeling. I already had an enormous affection for this novel, and I think you just increased it. So, thank you for sharing that.

JFB: It's funny that in the spirit of this 18-, 19-year-old girl is my 94-year-old mom.

CH: Yes. And Lily is adorable and ebullient and triumphant in so many ways in the book, despite what happens to her in the plot. And it is no surprise that she is loved, deeply and sincerely, by a boy named Asher whose mother is the other primary point of view character, named Olivia. As you were speaking and mentioned that Lily had been picked up and whisked away by her mom, it occurred to me, so had Asher. They had that in common. So, Jodi, how was it for you to construct this character of Olivia?

JP: It was easy for me to imagine a mom who has a kid on the cusp of adulthood. My kids are older than Asher, but I remember being there very clearly. And you both recognize the adult they're becoming and you don't recognize the adult they're becoming. And Olivia has this added wrinkle in her life. As you mentioned, she took Asher and she escaped an abusive relationship. And she started over, which is the epitome of being a good mom, protecting your kid.

But abuse is a cycle. And when Asher is suddenly being questioned by the police and charged with the murder of Lily, there's a part of her that wonders, "What don't I know about this person I love so much?" Which, again, another theme that runs right through the middle of the book. And it was really important to me that Olivia come from a background of abuse. That experience of living in a body that can make you a victim is a very scary thing, when you're a woman. And it was really important to me that Olivia have that experience, because all of her experiences going forward in the book come from what she had escaped in the past when she herself was trapped and when she herself was a victim of her own weakness, really.

JFB: If I can just go off of the question that I think is fundamental to the book, it is to what degree are we now the people we have been? Olivia is formerly a battered wife, and so she bears this memory. That's her history. And the question is, to what degree is our history who we are now? And I can tell you, as a transgender woman, I went through transition 25 years ago and I wonder sometimes, "So what does it mean to be a woman who had a boyhood of sorts?" It's not as if my life began 25 years ago, and it's not as if Olivia's life began the day she left her husband. You can run from your past, but you can't completely escape your past. So, I think this is how people wind up haunted.

"You can run from your past, but you can't completely escape your past. So, I think this is how people wind up haunted."

JP: I want to jump off that and say that does become a focal point in the book too. What do we owe the people that we love? What do we have to tell them about our past? Should I have to disclose to a new partner that I was in an abusive relationship like Olivia was? Do I have to disclose if I had an abortion? Does someone who, like Jenny, transitioned, have to disclose that to a new partner? These are questions that, if you're in a relationship with someone, then you're going to find yourself asking and wondering about. And it doesn't really matter whether you're cis or trans or any of those things, we all are facing the same questions when it comes to the difference between what's secret and what's private.

CH: Thank you for that. It's wonderful. To jump off that, from Jenny's use of the word haunted, I was saying earlier, to me it was new and exciting, even though very emotionally freighted, to see this trope of a formerly abused woman needing to ask herself, "Can I trust this person I love?" and to have it be about a child, not a romantic partner. I thought that the story did that brilliantly, what you just described.

JFB: Yeah, that was mostly Jodi. Among the things that Jodi really took point on was doing the deep dive into Olivia's past. And when Jodi said, "I think I want to make Olivia a formerly abused wife," I was a little bit scared. Like, “Really? Is this what we're going to do?” And then, of course, you realize it's Jodi Picoult's story, or at least partly Jodi Picoult's story, so of course that's what we're going to do. We're going to go to that vulnerable, difficult place, and humanize it, which is just what she did. That was Jodi. Also, can I say, the bees.

JP: [Laughs]

JFB: The whole thing with the bees, that was Jodi.

CH: That's my next question. Because everything I know about elephants, I learned from Leaving Time. So, I was like, who did the deep dive on the apiaries here?

JP: That would've been me. So, fun fact, we wrote this book during COVID. We didn't have vaccines yet, and I was super COVID-averse, because I have asthma and I was terrified. The only time that I left my house was to go weekly to check the bees with the beekeeper I was shadowing from six feet away, wearing a mask underneath my bee helmet, trying to be as safe as I could. Bees are incredible. Do you realize that one out of every three or four bites that you eat is thanks to a bee? Because they do all the pollination.

CH: Thank you, bees.

JP: Like 80 percent of the crops that humans eat are thanks to bees. This is why it's so scary when we start losing bees. But the thing I love about bees is that girls run the bee world, right? They do the nursing, the foraging, they do the cleaning, they do the protection. Of course, there's a queen bee.

JFB: It's a matriarchal society.

JP: It's totally matriarchal. There are drones, right? Those are the males. And the only thing that drones exist for is one day, when the new queen is hatched and she goes out on her maiden flight, they fly up into the air and they mate with the queen. When a drone mates with the queen, his genitals snap off, and you can audibly hear it. And he falls to his death. And the drones that don't get to mate with the queen, they're dead weight in the hive because they're just sucking resources. So they are killed by the worker bees before the winter.

But wait, I'm going to tell you the best part. The way that worker bees create a new queen is, they can take any larval cell and feed it something called royal jelly, which is super full of protein. And if you feed a larva only royal jelly, it develops into a queen. But, this is the best thing, it can be a fertilized egg, which would've normally been a female worker bee. You can also turn a drone egg, which is unfertilized, into a queen bee. I leave that there for you.

JFB: That's so cool. I'll just add this, since Mad Honey is, among other things, a novel of murder and suspense, let us not forget: What did Sherlock Holmes do after he retired? He became a beekeeper. Did you know that?

JP: I didn't know that.

JFB: Can I just say that the other working title, at least early on for this book, was Smoke and Honey. Because the way you stun the bees when you're messing with the hive is there's a thing that creates smoke. And it makes the bees kind of lazy and zones them out. And I liked the title Smoke and Honey because it's also the two of us. And I'll let you figure out which one of us is Smoke.

JP: Wow. Wait, I don't even know which one of us is Smoke [laughs].

JFB: I'm totally freaking Smoke [laughs].

JP: Oh, okay.

JFB: You're Honey, baby.

JP: All right. I'll take it.

JFB: Wait, are we going to fight over this too? Which one of us gets to be Smoke?

JP: No, no. I like being Honey. Honey never spoils.

JFB: This is just like writing the book all over again.

CH: That's a fascinating window into how this novel that I love got written. I can't thank you enough.

JFB: We had a thing, there's a somewhat minor character who is the local detective.

CH: Oh, Mike Newcomb.

JFB: And I had in the back of my mind, as we got toward the end of the book, that Lily's mother, who's Ava, was going to run off with Detective Newcomb. And one day I wrote Jodi, "Okay, I'm thinking of going here." And she just wrote me back, and I quote, "Bwahaha, he's mine." She had plans for Detective Newcomb.

I think of Ava as my character, because, you know, she's Lily's. I love Ava. Of the major characters, she's probably the least important. But Lily calls her Ranger Mom. She works for the Forest Service. And she Is just this fierce, independent woman who, like Olivia, will do anything for her child.

CH: Before we finish up with the honey, I have two questions. I'm just going to indulge myself, because this is a personal question. Are you going to announce the book publication to the hives?

JP: Well, I'm not. And I'm going to tell you why. First of all, what you're referring to is the fact that, if you are a beekeeper, you tell your bees about major life events. You tell them if someone in the family's getting married. You probably recently heard that when Queen Elizabeth died, her royal beekeepers told the bees that she was dead. And that is a thing. That is totally a thing. I am not going to tell the hives, because after I did the research with this particular beekeeper—I live in New England, where it's very cold, and there's a whole protocol for boxing up the hives with these giant bricks of sugar and fondant so that they can live through the winter. And literally every single bee died that winter. The poor guy had to start the next year with a whole bunch of new hives. And he actually wrote me, because I had done all the research already. He was like, "You definitely came the right year." So, there were no bees left to tell.

JFB: Wait, they died? Or they were murdered?

JP: Well, I'll never tell.

JFB: They're going to send the police around your house, Jodi, to look for stray traces of honey.

CH: My last honey question. Would you like to describe what mad honey is? For listeners who might not know the significance of the title.

JP: Yeah. So, when I discovered this, I was like, "Boom, here's the title." Mad honey is a very specific kind of honey that comes mostly from the Nepal region. As you know, bees go and they forage and they get pollen and nectar, and they bring it back to a hive. And depending on where they forage for their pollen and nectar, that's why you have wildflower honey or orange blossom honey. It depends on what plants they're taking their nectar and their pollen from.

In Nepal, there are mountain laurel and certain rhododendrons. And when the bees there forage those plants, the honey that is created is almost hallucinogenic and very physically dangerous if you ingest that honey. You can wind up vomiting and being dizzy and running a fever and being very incapacitated, having heart palpitations. Sometimes you can be killed. Most of the time you're just really out of it. And what's interesting about mad honey is that this is something that has been known about for literally thousands of years. There are records from ancient Persia and ancient Greece where mad honey was left in the path of approaching soldiers, intentionally, so that they would ingest it, get really sick, and be easily routed by the soldiers that had left it there for them. What I love about it is, it tastes great. And I love the idea that something sweet can be incredibly dangerous.

CH: Thank you for all the honey lore. I want to finish up this little unit on these amazing female voices that you constructed on the page, and these two narrators of Lily and Olivia. I wanted to ask, how does it feel to have them brought to life in audio by Carrie Coon and Key Taw?

JP: I am so excited. I was not familiar with Key's work, but her demos were incredible, and she's perfect for the part. And Carrie Coon, I can't say enough about. I'm a Broadway geek. I'm actually writing librettos now, of musicals. I was like, "What? Carrie Coon said yes?" I haven't personally interacted with her yet, but you can bet I'm going to. It's very exciting for me. She's really soothing, but also so wise. And knowing about her voice, that made her such a good fit for Olivia.

It's so funny, because people always ask writers, "Do you get say over who gets to do your audiobooks?" And I always say, "Anyone can read the book. I don't really have voices in my head when I'm writing." It is totally a lie, because when I then hear samples, I'm like, "No. That's definitely not Olivia's voice. Nope, no, no.” I guess you do hear it, somehow, subconsciously. So I'm very excited about this tape.

JFB: The main thing I'll say about the Audible book, one, how grateful we are that it's happening. But also, I'm just, my gratitude is just that I didn't have to do it. Not that I would've been right for either of these characters, but I've done two memoirs and a nonfiction book called Good Boy, so I've done it on three occasions. And it is such grueling work. I mean, I'm really proud of the books that I narrated, but I really hope to never do it again. I'm grateful just to have it in the hands of people who know what they're doing.

CH: Did you ever narrate one of your books?

JP: I did a group of short stories in audiobook format. It was three essays/short stories. And it took, like, 24 hours. And I remember thinking there just is not enough time in the world for this. It was grueling, it was really hard.

JFB: You did the short story in the wake of the Dobbs [Supreme Court] decision? “The Choice”?

JP: That was narrated by another professional audiobook reader.

JFB: It's worth plugging it. “Choice,” it's a speculative short story based on the idea of what would happen if men could get pregnant. You can check it out on Audible.

CH: I also need to shout-out your publisher, Penguin Random House Audio, for casting these roles. I agree with you that Carrie Coon sounds like an everywoman who all of a sudden becomes this oracular voice of wisdom. And, to Jenny's point, my next question was going to be, for listeners who love Mad Honey, what would you recommend as a next listen? I love Jenny's suggestion of “Choice,” written by Jodi Picoult, narrated by Therese Plummer. Where would you like them to head next? And it's okay to mention your own wonderful works.

JP: Oh, that's really hard. There have been some terrific books about what womanhood means in America right now. My mind does go right now to Dobbs, because of what's going on in America. If I were going to recommend another book of mine that addresses where we live right now, in this country, as women, I would probably recommend A Spark of Light.

JFB: And as for me, if you read Mad Honey and you're interested in some of the topics that are in this book, you might want to check out my memoir, She's Not There, which is narrated by me but also has an afterword not only from my wife, Deirdre, but also an afterword by my dear friend Richard Russo, which he narrates. I mean, you get three narrators for the price of one.

CH: I really love how game you both are about talking about books in our format. Really, thank you so much.

JP: I love audiobooks. Gosh, can I tell you what I do every day?

CH: Uh, yes.

JP: It's really important. So, I am a swimmer, I love to swim. And so I listen to audiobooks while I swim. It's amazing.

CH: So, my final question, what do you want listeners to take away with them, personally, from the experience of listening to your work? What do you think, Jodi?

JP: I actually say this in the author's note. I don't want readers to take anything away. I want them to give. I want them to give a thought. I want them to give a damn. And I want them to give maybe a little bit of respect for people who might be different from them.

"I don't want readers to take anything away. I want them to give."

JFB: Yeah. I can't say it any better. I do believe that right now our country and our world is torn apart by our fear of difference. Whether it's race or whether it's religion or privilege, we're losing our minds with our inability to understand each other. It's a lack of moral imagination, which is the thing that Atticus Finch tells Scout to have, to imagine what it's like to walk in somebody else's shoes. And I hope that Mad Honey will give people a chance to walk in the shoes of someone like Lily. It'll give you a chance to walk in the shoes of someone like Olivia. And I hope it'll open peoples' hearts.

CH: On that note, I would like to thank both of you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking time out of your day and for opening up the treasure trove of your wisdom to talk about honey and moral imagination and novels of suspense. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

JFB: Thanks so much.

JP: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

CH: Listeners can get Mad Honey now at Audible.com.