Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/40669
" have some bad news. And it's really bad news." It was the summer of 2009, and best-selling author Jacquelyn Mitchard and her husband, Chris, were vacationing on Cape Cod when Mitchard's longtime assistant, Pam, phoned. "The money. It's all gone," Pam said. The money was the couple's life savings, invested with a financial manager hundreds of miles away. They were the funds Mitchard and her husband kept in mind as they prepared for the future— college for their kids, retirement, travel—and the safety net they had woven from years of hard work and milestones of success. Rewind to a time 15 years ago, when a different type of phone call changed her life. It was 1996 when Oprah Winfrey herself called to say she had chosen Mitchard's novel, "The Deep End of the Ocean," as the inaugural selection for what would become the famed Oprah's Book Club. That was the moment that sent Mitchard's career into a whole new stratosphere. Penned as she adjusted to single parenthood after the death of her first husband, the book went on to sell 12 million copies worldwide and was made into a Hollywood feature film. But on this day, the mood after the phone call was different. Mitchard was in disbelief. Soon the details trickled in: Mitchard and her husband would find out they were victims of an interna- tional Ponzi scheme involving a Minneapolis money manager who would ultimately admit to bilking thousands of investors out of more than $190 million, sending many into a tailspin of financial ruin. Though the details came, answers wouldn't. The money was in- explicably and instantly gone. The best-selling author with the emotional success story—from the death of her first husband to Oprah's call, 17 more books, remarriage, nine children and a re- covery from a serious accident—was broke. It's been a life of dramatic ups and downs for Mitchard. Through it all, she has continually reinvented herself. Now, at 56, Mitchard is starting over, once again. Ask Mitchard what subjects drive her to write, and you get a sim- ple answer. She writes about ordinary people with ordinary prob- lems, until they come to the point in their lives when the trapdoor opens and they fall down. 42 BRAVA Magazine August 2011 "That's when I come in," she says. "I want to know what happens after the people who brought the casserole have left, to explore the effect on people's lives when the unexpected happens, when hail falls out of a blue sky." Mitchard was raised near Chicago. The daughter of a plumber and retail clerk, she would become the first person on either side of her family to graduate from high school, let alone college. And, true to her blue-collar upbringing, she has worked every day since she was 17, steadily laying the bricks for the kind of life she always wanted. Until her late 30s, that meant a steady job, kids and a husband. But after every piece was in place, her life took a dramatic turn. Mitchard was working part time at the University of Wisconsin when her first husband, Dan, a newspaperman in his mid-40s, was diagnosed with colon cancer. His case was terminal. In 1993, Dan died and Mitchard was left with four young kids and no financial security to speak of. Stumbling through her grief and looking for change, Mitchard decided to take a big risk. She pulled an old idea that had long re- sided in the back of her mind, and, with no formal training beyond one semester of creative writing in college, sat down to write a novel. She didn't know where the effort would lead, but in the face of events she never expected to endure, suddenly nothing seemed impossible. So Mitchard wrote. And wrote. The ultimate result was her novel, "The Deep End of the Ocean." "I didn't know that within a year it would be a big hit," she says. While the captivating novel garnered praise from critics, it also caught the attention of Oprah, who chose the novel to be the first selection in her Book Club. "[That] was an amazing, life-changing experience," Mitchard says. "At that time everyone underestimated the hunger and thirst people had for reading. [In later years], people wanted to find something wrong with the club—that it was too lowbrow or for suburban housewives. But I can't think of one bad thing about that experience. It was all good—both for me and for the people involved with it." Soon afterward, the hallmarks of literary success began to pour in: multi-book deals with publishers and a Hollywood movie based on her novel. For the first time in her life, Mitchard had plenty.