On the morning of 11 September 2001, a woman sits in the back of a cab on the West Side Highway with her hair braided and a red ribbon woven through it, on her way downtown to a psychiatrist’s office in the South Tower. She has spent the past week testing kitchen knives and writing out her husband’s passwords. The radio is recapping a competency hearing in Texas for a mother who drowned her five children. The driver glances at her in the mirror and looks away. Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult hands a reading group that cab ride within its first hundred and fifty pages, and almost everything worth arguing about afterwards is already inside it.
The Question the Novel Keeps Asking
Who gets believed, and what does it cost when they are not?
Eloise Ambrose is a mosaic artist, a few weeks postpartum, and quietly certain that something has gone badly wrong in her mind. She says so to a midwife, who recommends aromatherapy and a nap. She says so to a psychiatrist, who prescribes an antidepressant that leaves her feeling as though she is being burned alive. And she says so, in the end, to her oldest friend, and that conversation sets in motion everything that follows. The word nobody uses in 2001, because almost nobody in 2001 uses it, is psychosis.
Twenty-five years later her daughter Molly directs a state emergency preparedness office, a job that consists entirely of taking warnings seriously. Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult places those two women at either end of the same quarter-century and lets a group work out what changed and what did not.
What Jodi Picoult Does With Two Kinds of Tragedy
The novel’s real structural idea is the distance between public grief and private grief.
One of these gets memorials, brass panels, a pear tree coaxed back from rubble and an annual televised silence. The other gets a file note about new mother anxiety. Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult is careful never to argue that the second is worse, and equally careful to show that the first can swallow the second whole. A woman who disappears into a national catastrophe is grieved by thousands of strangers and misunderstood by all of them, including her own husband, who spends years on conspiracy forums rather than examine what he watched happen in his kitchen.
Groups will notice how much the book is interested in record-keeping. Eloise is declared dead by a state. Her name is engraved in bronze. Her family receives a compensation payment. A church obituary in Alabama lists her father’s one daughter, and it is not her. Reappearing, it turns out, is an administrative problem as much as an emotional one, and Picoult is very good on the indignity of that.
The Illness Nobody Would Name
The clinical material is where Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult earns its length.
Postpartum psychosis turns up in something like two deliveries in every thousand. It has no standalone listing in the diagnostic manual, which in practice means it gets identified only after being mistaken for a milder condition and treated with drugs that leave the patient far worse than before. Picoult stages all of that as lived experience rather than argument, then sets out the evidence plainly in a long Author’s Note built on correspondence with a woman writing to her from a jail cell.
That note is also where the legal argument surfaces, and it is the sharpest thing in the book for a discussion group. Roughly two dozen countries, Britain among them with its Infanticide Act, treat violence by a woman in a postpartum state as a mental disturbance rather than malice, and sentence accordingly. In the United States a single state permits a judge to weigh the condition at all. Picoult never turns Eloise into a test case, but the machinery is right there on the table.
Where Hollow Bones Strains
Not everything works.
- The final act reaches for a twist. A development arrives late that belongs to a glossier book, and it tugs the novel away from the thing it does best.
- One long interview delivers the research. A broadcast conversation near the end exists to hand clinical statistics straight to the reader.
- The Alabama childhood is assembled from familiar parts. Tyrant preacher, silent mother, doomed sister, white ribbon. Effective, and entirely recognisable.
- The husband never resolves. He is required to be blind in 2001 and tender in 2027, and the two men are not reconciled.
Against that, the long middle section in Atlanta, where a housekeeper brings home the guest she found bleeding out in one of her rooms and then asks her almost nothing, is the warmest and least sentimental writing in Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult, and the romance that grows out of those years is genuinely lovely.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with the decision. A woman in the grip of a delusion makes a choice in a single lucid moment and spends twenty-five years defending it. Ask the group whether that counts as a choice at all, and whether it matters that she later admits she ran to save herself as much as to save her daughter.
Then ask about the withholding. Two adults in Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult agree not to tell a child something true about her mother, on the grounds that she is better off with a kinder version. They are not lying for gain. They keep it up for a quarter of a century. Ask whose comfort that actually protects, and what a group would have done.
Finally, ask about the compensation. This family received money from a fund for the bereaved, and spent it on a house and a college education. Ask what is owed, and to whom, and whether anyone at the table would give it back.
Groups that want to stay in this territory should try Where the Wildflowers Grow by Terah Shelton Harris, which is equally unsentimental about grieving a parent whose illness did real harm. The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams suits a group drawn to mothers who protect daughters by withholding. By Any Other Name is Picoult’s other novel about a woman erased from the record. And The Fact Checker by Austin Kelley is the choice for anyone who wants a missing woman and a post-9/11 New York with none of the consolation.
Final Thoughts
There is a memory Eloise returns to twice. She is five years old, watching a robin’s nest outside her bedroom window, and the mother bird shoves one of her fledglings over the edge. The child screams. Her mother explains that birds have hollow bones, and that the fragility is the same thing as the flight.
That is what the novel finally puts in a reading group’s hands, and it is more troubling than it first appears. Every act of love in this book is also an act of damage: a woman who leaves to keep her child safe, a friend who lies to get help for someone who will not ask, a father who edits a dead woman into someone easier to admire. Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult does not sort these into right and wrong, and a group that tries to will be there all evening. Which is, of course, the point of choosing it.