When Jacquelyn Mitchard's young husband died of cancer in 1993, this mother of three, only in her 30s, says she could have easily withdrawn from the world.
"I thought I would become one of those people who did not live life boldly," says Mitchard, an LAS alumna. "I was terrified that my kids would see me become a timid person, afraid that bad things would happen and unwilling to take any chances."
So Mitchard took a chance. She wrote her first novel.
The result was the acclaimed number-one New York Times bestseller, The Deep End of the Ocean, which Oprah Winfrey chose in 1996 as the first entry in her now famous book club. The book was also turned into a movie starring Michelle Pfieffer and Whoopie Goldberg.
Mitchard, an LAS student from 1969 to 1971, returned to the U of I this past homecoming as part of the Writers Come Home program. Her former teacher, retired English professor Mark Costello, was on hand, and he noted that "before her appearance on Oprah, before her beautiful and chilling first novel, before the movie, Jackie did something almost as astonishing. She turned her fellow sophomores into her fans."
As Costello explained, his writing seminar spent so much time reading Mitchard's writings that his class could have been dubbed the Jackie Mitchard Workshop. Today, Mitchard's fan club has greatly expanded, now that she has penned eight adult novels and a pair of young adult novels, among other writings.
Mitchard, a Chicago native, lives with her second husband just outside of Madison, Wisc., where she juggles a hectic lecture and writing schedule with a family that has expanded to seven children. This leads to The Question That Must Be Asked: How can she handle such a workload with such a large family?
"I write anywhere I can," Mitchard says. "I wrote most of my next adult novel in a car between Wisconsin and Massachusetts on a lap desk surrounded by some of my children, plus my assistant's children. Concentration is the key. If I were the kind of person who needed absolute quiet to write, I'd never do anything."
Many of Mitchard's books deal with dark themes, including the one that sparked it all, The Deep End of the Ocean. This book, based on a true incident, tells of a four-year-old boy abducted in a crowded hotel, only to show up nine years later living in the same neighborhood as his still-grieving parents.
But Mitchard prefers to see her books as "challenging," rather than sad, and she sees her characters as real people facing real, extraordinary circumstances. As she points out, "There are very few people who have an unblemished life, where the trapdoor never opens under them."
When Mitchard's novel was chosen as the first entry in Oprah's book club, the show's producers did not foresee that the club would be the instant hit-maker it became. According to Mitchard, there were about 100,000 copies of The Deep End of the Ocean in print on the day she appeared on Oprah. But within two weeks, that number had skyrocketed to a million copies in print. On the day of the Oprah show, readers also put 4,000 holds on her book at the New York Public Library.
Mitchard says she strives to strike a balance between extreme plot-driven stories, which often lack in character development, and extreme character-driven stories, in which not much happens.
"In the very best books, things happen," she says. "People did not line up to buy the next installment of Great Expectations because they hoped Charles Dickens would come up with another good image. They wanted to know what would happen."
The term "page-turner" has become a dirty word among literary critics, but Mitchard welcomes the description. "What's the opposite?" she asks. "A book with pages you don't want to turn? A book you find boring and dense and impossible to read?"
Today, Mitchard is expanding into young adult novels because she says there is more freedom to take chances in that genre. And if there's anything she has learned over the years it is that life is about taking risks.
What's more, her children have taken this lesson to heart. Her oldest develops computer games for a living, the second oldest is studying to be a chef, and the next-in-line is heading into musical theater—all daring choices.
"They learned to do what they want with their lives and not play it safe," Mitchard says. "They got the message."
