Losing free speech “is a very, very slippery slope”, bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult has warned in a discussion about two of her books being banned in school districts in 35 US states.
The curbs placed on her books, My Sister’s Keeper and Nineteen Minutes, was “not a badge of honour”, she said at the prestigious Hay Festival in the United Kingdom, the BBC reports.
Picoult said she was “very fortunate because I’m at a point in my career where people who are going to be buying my books are not in school libraries”.
But the author, who has written 30 books and sold around 40 million copies, said this wasn’t the case for younger authors, LGBTQ writers or people of colour, “whose livelihood is writing for middle grade and young adult readers. They are suffering greatly”.
According to the BBC, some libraries and classrooms in the US have removed books with sexual content or themes of sexuality, gender identity and race. It notes that some conservative state authorities, such as Florida, have said they are not banning books but restricting inappropriate and harmful material.
Picoult told the audience at Hay that the reason Nineteen Minutes, which is about a US school shooting, was banned, was not because of the shooting scenes: “They have no problem with that. The problem is that on page 313, I use the term ‘erection’.”
She said the curbs on her books “only makes me want to keep doing it (what I’m doing)”.