My Sister’s Keeper Study Guide

Picoult was born on Long Island in 1966. She was interested in writing from a young age, having written her first story at age five. She studied creative writing at Princeton and published two short stories in Seventeen while still in college. She published her debut novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, in 1992. The novel, about a woman driving across the country to escape her abusive husband, was the first of many novels exploring ethical dilemmas and life situations. She gained a larger following after the publication of her 2007 novel Nineteen Minutes, a novel about a school shooting, when the novel reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. In addition to her writing career, Picoult is also an advocate for a variety of causes, such as anti-death penalty activism and initiatives to boost the voices of marginalized writers. Today, she lives in Hanover, New Hampshire with her husband and her three children. She and her daughter Samantha have written two books together.

The early 2000s, much like today, were a time of heated debates about bodily autonomy and the ethical limits of individuals having complete control over their medical decisions. In particular, the turn of the 21st century saw increased anxiety around in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the theoretical possibility of parents being able to “design” their babies in order to remove “undesirable” traits. Much of this anxiety came from a wariness around eugenics, a 20th-century movement pioneered by America and later adopted by Nazi Germany that advocated for “cleansing” humanity of undesirable peoples. The fact that Sara and Brian conceive Anna specifically to be a donor for Kate intentionally evokes questions about how much of a right people have to artificially engineer their children for their own ends.

Many of Picoult’s novels focus on families who find themselves entangled in difficult moral dilemmas. One Picoult novel that shares many themes and plot elements with My Sister’s Keeper is her 2009 novel Handle With Care. This novel focuses on a pair of parents who struggle with their daughter Willow’s osteogenesis imperfecta (or “brittle bone syndrome”), with the mother ultimately choosing to sue her OB/GYN for not informing her of the OI during her pregnancy and thus making it impossible for her to make an informed decision about whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. Like My Sister’s Keeper, Handle With Care grapples with difficult questions around parenthood and bodily autonomy, with these questions being debated within the walls of a courtroom. Outside of Picoult’s bibliography, John Green’s 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars is another contemporary literary work that has become famous for its unflinching look at cancer. The novel’s protagonist, Hazel Grace, suffers from metastasizing thyroid cancer and falls in love with a boy named Augustus who is in remission from osteosarcoma. The fate of their relationship, in which the seemingly healthier love interest dies suddenly and leaves the sicker one alone, mirrors the doomed relationship of Kate and Taylor in My Sister’s Keeper. Picoult herself praised The Fault in Our Stars for its adept combination of tragedy and humor.