Smash hit

“When I was reading the script, I didn’t necessarily agree with what Sara was doing,” Diaz says, “but I realised that I couldn’t judge her. I don’t know what it feels like to have a child that’s dying, thankfully.”

Diaz insists that when she decided to do the film, she gave no thought to career, or Oscar, concerns. “I have never been driven by that. People ask me, ‘Do you worry about taking this role where you play a parent of teenagers?’ It never even crossed my mind. I didn’t think about whether or not people would believe I was a parent. I didn’t worry if people would then only see me as a parent. Or that they wouldn’t see me as they had seen me in the past. None of those things. They don’t motivate me, they don’t stop me from going after those things I want to achieve or take on or be challenged by.”

All that did worry her, she says, was that, given the subject matter, the film could be “overly sentimental, TV movie-esque”. But she felt that Cassavetes, who has dealt for many years with the severe illness of one of his own children, “would honour the story and the family, and that the film would be very human”.

What Diaz was not prepared for was a very personal tragedy that eerily mirrored the bleak theme of the film. In April last year, while they were shooting, Diaz’s father, Emilio, died suddenly, of pneumonia. He was 58. Diaz was brought up in a working-class family in Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles. Her father was a second-generation Cuban-American who worked as a foreman for an oil company; she has one sister, two years older.

Diaz admits that her father’s unexpected death shook her to the core. “It was such a sudden thing,” she says, shaking her head. “So f***ing weird.” After taking a brief break, she says that it helped her to return to work on My Sister’s Keeper, and to be able to talk about her father’s death with Cassa­vetes, whose own father, the director John Cassa­vetes, died at a similarly young age. “I really was grateful to come back to all of the people in this film and to be making a movie with this subject matter,” she says. “And grateful that Nick could help me understand what the f*** was going on.”

Given what she had to deal with while she was making My Sister’s Keeper, I’m intrigued that Diaz recently made some apparently controversial remarks about women who don’t want to have children, which were reported in the British press. “I think women are afraid to say that they don’t want children because they’re going to get shunned,” she said. “And honestly? We don’t need any more kids. We have plenty of people on this planet.”

I wonder whether Diaz feels that not because she doesn’t want children, but because, having just made a film about the death of a child — for which she talked to a number of women whose children had died — while dealing with her grief over her own father’s death, for the moment she just can’t face the possibility of such a terrible loss as that of a child.

“Death is very different from life,” she says she has learnt. “Death is death, and it’s only one thing. It’s so hard for a parent to have a child die, because they know all the things that that child is not going to have...”

Coping with her father’s death, pondering whether she wants children of her own: in the past few months Diaz, as a woman and an actress, has clearly become very much aware of the inexor­able march of time. It seems to have made her realise that, at the age of 36, Cameron Diaz, sexy goofball, has a limited shelf life.

“Talking about how all women age, we all see ourselves one way, we all want to stay where we were when we felt our best, but, of course, we do change,” she says. “If you try to hold on to something that’s passed, you get into trouble. It’s very sad when people are unhappy because they are not grateful for what they have.”

Cameron Diaz has no intention of ever being ungrateful.

My Sister’s Keeper opens on Friday.

Jodi Picoult is a cheery juggernaut.

If she regularly tops the bestseller lists across the world, it’s no accident: Picoult, 43, is savvy and determined, Princeton- and Harvard-educated, living the dream she had from an early age. Growing up on Long Island, in a loving, stable family, she decided to become a writer. Now, with a loving, stable family of her own in New Hampshire (a husband and three children), she produces a novel once a year, invariably dealing with some contentious issue and promising an ever-contorting story line. She has also written for DC Comics’s Wonder Woman, but this work seems a little “Anita Brookner” next to the plots of some of her novels. Teen rape, child murder, terminal illness and high-school shootings have been just some of her topics so far (The poor children suffer plenty here.)

My Sister’s Keeper brought her to our attention in 2005, thanks to the Richard & Judy Book Club, but it was in fact her 11th novel. Five others have followed. As Picoult has a rigorous work cycle — at any given time, she is promoting her previous work, writing the current one and researching the next — we already know that in 2010 she will be serving up something on Asperger’s syndrome, and in 2011 she’ll tackle gay rights.

Picoult’s style has its detractors: “transatlantic schmaltz” was one description. If she denies this, vigorously defending herself against a perceived literary elite (she is happiest comparing herself to Charles Dickens), she does know that the bad things her characters experience so relentlessly are part of the attraction. She explains this as part of the “therapeutic schadenfreude” her novels apparently offer; analysing, not just enjoying, the misfortune of others. Her readers would seem to agree, enjoying the “what would you do?” element that Picoult exploits. These are books to get people talking, and this serves her doubly, as discussion not only indulges the ideas, it provides the word-of-mouth support that has been key to her success, while the literary press looks on in derision.

Louis Wise

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