Authors at Home: Jacquelyn Mitchard, “The Good Son”
We are pleased to feature best-selling journalist and author, Jacquelyn Mitchard, whose debut novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was Oprah’s first Book Club selection. Her new novel, The Good Son, was published in January by MIRA. The Good Son centers on Thea, whose son, Stefan, has been released from prison after being convicted of murdering his girlfriend, Belinda. Yet as the family attempts to move forward, Thea begins to suspect that there is more to uncover about the night Belinda died. Read on to learn more about The Good Son and Jacquelyn Mitchard.
What are you currently reading, watching, listening to? Anything you wholly recommend as being inspiring, uplifting or just really fun?
In between books, I sort of binge-watch TV and right now I’m watching Call the Midwife, which is so sweet and inspiring that it could make your teeth hurt! I’m also listening to an older podcast about Siegfried and Roy, and more specifically, the attack on Roy Horn by his beloved white tiger, Montecor, and it’s absolutely fascinating the way that human beings misunderstand wild animals.
Can you take us through the day in the life of Jacquelyn Mitchard? What’s your day-to-day routine like — when you’re writing a book, and when you’re not?
I get up early, early, early, not much later than 5 a.m. and I check the mail for dire requests and fun discussions from readers. I take the dog out and make my one cup of coffee for the day, which is a latte and which means a GREAT DEAL to me. If it’s Saturday, I make a fancy breakfast for the group — omelets or French toast. I figure out what dinner is going to be. I only cook vegetarian food, even though not everyone is a vegetarian. If they want meat, they can get it on the street and cook it on their own! I make lots of spicy Italian and Mexican and Indian dishes. I put the ingredients for that day’s loaf of bread in the bread machine. (Eight people live in the house right now and they eat a loaf of bread every day.) Then I start to write. If I’m planning a book, I’m trying to figure out what the characters would do that would be exciting to the reader and has meaningful thematic possibilities. I explore the motivations, the profession, the age and politics and religion of the main character. If I’m writing, I decide where in the book I’m going to write “to” (I’ll write to the part where she goes to visit the priest … I’ll write until she figures out who the girl really is …) I don’t write more than four hours because then I start to make mistakes. Afterward, I might do more research or a little editing or work on an essay that someone has asked me to write … then I make dinner, visit with my family, help anyone with projects they might need, look at things online I’ll never buy, visit with my best friend by chat, settle down to read … and try to fall asleep. I’m a terrible sleeper.
This book deals with some incredibly challenging situations, scenarios, and emotions. What was the most challenging part of writing The Good Son?
Creating larger-than-life situations in ways people would find believable was one goal: I had to believe in them first, to create the logistics for them — for the protestors and the Healing Project. How would that really work? Then, it was imbuing a character with both qualities a reader would need, to make Jill, the mother of the murdered girl, sympathetic despite her bitterness, because she was so bereft and broken. Then, and this is always the case, it’s to try to express big, deep emotions without them ever becoming sloppy or overstated.
An encounter with a woman whose son was in jail inspired you to write this story. What was the research process like for The Good Son?
It was necessary to talk to people whose children were incarcerated when they were very young, teenagers like Stefan was when he was convicted. One of these women had a 19-year-old in prison and she described him as “a good son, but not a good boy.” He was devoted to his mom and dad, but for the group of kids he’d grown up with, going to prison was almost an expected thing, almost a source of pride. The other woman was a single mom, a widow, and her son was very carefully raised, tenderly raised, and he was part of a spectacularly violent crime and was sent away for a long time. People could not believe it. They could not believe it of this boy, of this family.
Do you relate to Stefan’s mother, Thea? In what ways? Do you think people will identify with her?
I cannot imagine that readers won’t identify with Thea. Whatever else is true, I know that she is authentic. I wanted to cast her in an honest, completely fair light, which meant including not only her love for Stefan but also her rage at him and her resentment of how his obsession with the girl he was terrified of losing had ruined not only his life but her own life — cost her friends, basically cost her job and shattered the life of her close-knit extended family. I understood her mixed emotions, her fear of the media, of her neighbors, of the intruder who spies on her, even wondering if she should fear her very own child, her longing for her simpler past. She was an ordinary woman with ordinary dreams who said that nothing in her life had prepared her for “anything except moderate good fortune.” And she was cast into the abyss.
If you weren’t writing books right now, what would you be doing?
It’s the only thing I know how to do. I don’t have other talents, like all my friends, who are also doctors and painters and scientists or who raise horses or make gourmet salsa. I can only write. If I wasn’t a writer, I would have wanted to be a judge. I’m really interested in people at the extremes of life. What I would wish to be doing is to have lots of money and travel all the time in fancy ways to great places. I would say I would start a scholarship fund for teen moms who want to be writers — but I already did that.
What can readers look forward to from you in the future?
More mayhem. I’m just starting a novel about a young woman who’s an acclaimed underwater photographer who comes home to visit her 60-year-old widowed father, only to learn he’s married her best friend. But that’s just the beginning…
What is one big message you want readers to take away from The Good Son?
I think it is the astonishing persistence of love — against all odds, despite all challenges. I once saw a Ted Talk given by Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the school shooters at Columbine. And I think that people were surprised when she said that she absolutely still loved her son, despite the shame and grief she would feel all her life for his acts and her ambivalence about his death. I didn’t doubt her for a moment. I would feel the same way.
Book Summary:
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard comes the gripping, emotionally charged novel of a mother who must help her son after he is convicted of a devastating crime.
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?
About Jacquelyn Mitchard:
Jacquelyn Mitchard was born in Chicago. Her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was published in 1996, becoming the first selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club and a #1 New York Times bestseller. Nine other novels, four children’s books and six young adult novels followed, including Two if By Sea, No Time to Wave Goodbye, Still Summer, All We Know of Heaven, and The Breakdown Lane. Mitchard’s writing has won or been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, UK’s Talkabout Prize, and the Bram Stoker Award. A former daily newspaper reporter, Mitchard is a professor in the Master of Fine Arts program at Miami University of Ohio. She frequently writes for such publications as Glamour, O the Oprah Winfrey Magazine, Marie Claire, and Reader’s Digest. Her essays and short stories have been widely anthologized. She lives on Cape Cod with her family.
Connect with Jacquelyn:
Website: https://jacquelynmitchard.com/
Twitter: @jackiemitchard
Facebook: @jacquelyn.mitchard
Instagram: @jacquelynmitchard
Read more Authors at Home:
Yasmin Angoe: Her Name is Knight
Lynne Reeves: The Dangers of an Ordinary Night
Gabrielle St. George: How to Murder a Marriage
Cai Emmons: Sinking Islands
Emily Giffin: The Lies that Bind
Jeanette Escudero: The Apology Project
