Please don’t get me started on Nicholas Sparks,” she says, rolling her eyes. It was when The Bridges of Madison County had been published.

It was years ago, my kids were really tiny. Has she ever thought of writing under a pen name? Because that is the worst, most depressing chick-lit ever.”

When people call The Storyteller chick-lit, I actually break up laughing. What is The Corrections about, by Jonathan Franzen? It’s about a family, right? And I’m attacking gun control and teen suicide and end-of-life care and the Holocaust, and I’m writing women’s fiction? I mean, I can’t tell you. What is it about? It’s about a woman choosing between two men. If Jenny Eugenides had written it, it would have had a pink fluffy cover on it. If I had written that, it would have had a pink, fluffy cover on it. Look at The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. “If a woman had written One Day, it would have been airport fiction. Struggling writers might think that this commercial success should negate any need for literary fanfare, but it sticks in her craw. Picoult does this every year with every new novel – she has a rock-star schedule matched only by her following, nicknamed the #jodiverse on Twitter. The 48-year-old orders a pot of tea and says goodbye to her husband, who is accompanying her on this leg of her three-month book tour. Unfortunately, it means you have lady parts.” “And women’s fiction doesn’t mean that’s your audience.

“ I write women’s fiction,” she says, an 'apparently’ hanging in the air. Yet despite this success – 23 novels in 22 years, eight of which have been number one on the New York Times bestseller list – she struggles to be taken seriously. She has still-wet curls and a fresh-faced, healthy glow about her it is the kind of healthy glow that exudes from people that have sold more books this century than William Shakespeare or Ian McEwan or Charles Dickens. She is to the point, no-nonsense, as I had started to suspect from reading her books. We meet in a hotel off Sloane Square, me feeling miserable, her a bundle of all-American energy, ready to seize the day, or at the very least an interview with The Telegraph followed by an appearance on Loose Women. I felt quite bleak by the time I got round to reading her latest, Leaving Time, whose ending I have been banned from revealing, but suffice to say, it didn’t leave me feeling particularly cheery. Nineteen Minutes: a high-school shooting. My Sister’s Keeper, turned into a Cameron Diaz movie, is about childhood leukaemia and stem-cell research. The Pact is billed as a teenage love story – only it is one that ends with a bullet in the girl’s head. The backdrop to Picture Perfect may be Hollywood, but only as the setting for a tale of horrific domestic violence. Before meeting Jodi Picoult, I had it in my mind that she wrote big, sweeping romance novels, guilty pleasures for hot beach holidays, and so set about my research with barely concealed glee.

Jodi picoult wolves