Picoult expanded her writing beyond novels in 2007 when she became the writer of the
DC Comics series
Wonder Woman (vol. 3), following the departure of
Allan Heinberg. Her first issue number 6 was released on March 28, 2007, and her last was issue number 10, released on June 27, 2007. That same year, her novel
Nineteen Minutes, which is about the aftermath of a school shooting in a small town, published on March 9, 2007, was her first book to debut at number 1 on the
New York Times Best Seller list. She continued this line of success with her novels,
Change of Heart, published on March 4, 2008,
Handle with Care in 2009 and
House Rules in 2010, all of which reached number 1 on the list. Picoult's work is often categorized as
chick-lit, a somewhat derisive label. However, she has claimed to accept a lack of critical acclaim in exchange for popularity: "I'm never going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, not going to win a National Book Award, never even going to be nominated. What you trade for that is sales and readership. And I would rather reach more people. It would be very nice to not be unfairly accused of being a bad writer, but hopefully if you do pick up one of my books, you will be quickly disabused of that notion." In November 2019, Picoult was involved in a widely reported online controversy with Brooke Nelson, a college student who was mentioned in her local newspaper as saying she thought that author
Sarah Dessen's YA novels were not suitable for the Common Read program run by
Northern State University, Aberdeen. Instead she had advocated for the inclusion of
Just Mercy, a memoir by civil rights attorney
Bryan Stevenson. Picoult described Nelson's views as "sinister" and "demeaning to women", and encouraged her followers on Twitter to "fight the patriarchy" in response to Nelson's comments. When the story was reported in
Jezebel,
The Guardian,
The Washington Post, and
Slate, Picoult posted an apology on Twitter, noting that her remarks had resulted in harassment and bullying of Nelson. Her 2024 novel
By Any Other Name is based on the premise that the poet
Emilia Lanier was
the author of several works traditionally attributed to
William Shakespeare. In the publication of the book, Picoult raises
alternate theories of Shakespeare authorship, claiming that the name "William Shakespeare" functioned as a collective identity for many different types of authors. Picoult characterized Shakespeare's identity as a literary "
in-joke" whose context was lost over time, and argued that the widely accepted
Stratfordian Shakespeare could not have written the
proto-feminist characters that punctuate many of his works. The novel's premise was widely rejected by Shakespearean historians. == Advocacy ==