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Working on a novel about a brilliant Biology student who becomes a high-priced "call girl" and is charged with murdering her two most devoted clients for life insurance. This story, suggested by a real-life case, ties in with what intrigues me -- desperate choices made by people who seem to have no reason to make them, and how, in life as in fiction, nothing is ever as it seems and dreams and fears are often beyond our wildest imaginings. I've been reading everything by Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout, Kazuo Ishiguro, Lisa Genova, Karen Dionne, Gillian Flynn -- all writers puzzling with the contradictions of human nature.
Writing is a performing art, like singing or dancing, and it's not complete until the reader takes your hand and understands.
What kinds of stories keep YOU up at night?
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Stunned by her recently widowed father’s reckless behavior, a young woman must learn to navigate a new world—where the people she should trust the most have become strangers she cannot trust at all.
Frankie Attleboro returns home to Cape Cod with thrilling news. She’s met the love of her life, and they’re getting married with a baby on the way. That’s the moment her father makes his own jaw-dropping announcement: at sixty, he’s getting married as well, to Frankie’s best friend, Ariel, who is also pregnant, and due soon.
As Frankie and Ariel struggle to adjust to their new relationship, Ariel’s estranged mother, Carlotta, returns after a decade-long absence. She claims to be a changed woman—but is she really? And where has she been all these years? Frankie is suspicious, and as Carlotta’s unpredictable behavior intensifies, Frankie must untangle the threads of the past to protect Ariel’s future—and her own.
“To write about those oldest of subjects—families, their secrets, their betrayals—and make them not only new but revelatory, it takes an absolute master of storytelling. How lucky for all of us that we have Jacquelyn Mitchard on the job! She writes, as always, with empathy, humor, and grace. This book is a scandalous delight.”
— Rebecca Makkai, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Believers, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
What do you do when the person you love best becomes unrecognizable to you? For Thea Demetriou, the answer is both simple and agonizing: you keep loving him somehow.
Stefan was just seventeen when he went to prison for the drug-fueled murder of his girlfriend, Belinda. Three years later, he’s released to a world that refuses to let him move on. Belinda’s mother, once Thea’s good friend, galvanizes the community to rally against him to protest in her daughter’s memory. The media paints Stefan as a symbol of white privilege and indifferent justice. Neighbors, employers, even some members of Thea's own family turn away.
Meanwhile Thea struggles to understand her son. At times, he is still the sweet boy he has always been; at others, he is a young man tormented by guilt and almost broken by his time in prison. But as his efforts to make amends meet escalating resistance and threats, Thea suspects more forces are at play than just community outrage. And if there is so much she never knew about her own son, what other secrets has she yet to uncover—especially about the night Belinda died?
“Rich and complex, The Good Son is a compelling novel about the aftermath of a crime in a small, close-knit community.”
— Kristin Hannah, New York Times bestselling author
When Beth Cappadora, a suburban mother and photographer, loses sight of her three-year-old son, Ben, at her fifteenth high-school reunion, not only does her life implode, her family’s does as well. Her husband, Pat, discovers cracks in the marriage where there were no apparent rifts before. More disturbingly, her older son, Vincent, who was supposed to hold on to his little brother’s hand, begins a lifelong descent, intent on proving he is as shameful and unlovable as he believes his parents consider him to be. Then, in what appears to be a miracle, the Cappadora family finds Ben, who has been raised and loved by a former classmate of Beth’s — a woman whose success as an actress has been a mask for madness and depression — and her husband, who adores Ben as his son. Ben has no memory of his family; he is heartbroken and lost. The Deep End of the Ocean asks the reader, is it true that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones? The authenticity of grief in the novel was informed by the death of my husband, a man whose big Italian family, like the Cappadoras, was in the restaurant business, and who died the year before I began to write the book. Are we who we are because of our genetics or because of what we remember?
“A drama with the tension of a thriller that moves deeply into the emotional territory of family ties.”
— People
