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Galaxy Exclusives

• An Interview with Jackie Mitchard
• Q&A with Jackie Mitchard about 'Still Summer'

An Interview with Jackie Mitchard

How do you get your ideas?

Most of them come from real life, of course, just as the novels of Tolstoy and Flaubert came from newspaper clippings. Unlike other authors, the stories do not come from events in my life or my family; but, eerily, they seem to reflect things that do or have happened in my life. I suppose that is what draws me to them.

Why such sad stories?

I don’t think they’re sad. They challenging. They’re about ordinary people under pressure of extraordinary circumstance. Those pressures reveal people. They reveal character in a way that a great vacation at the beach (unless there is a shark) doesn’t. So while I don’t think I will always write sad stories (in fact, ‘Still Summer’ is more harrowing than emotionally wrought) I write about what’s on my mind and heart – the connections between people, people thrust out of their comfort zones, pity, honor, love, terror (Did I just make that up?)

Where do people “crave” your books?

Australia, the UK and Iowa! I knock ‘em dead there. Clergy are also very drawn to my books, although I’m not conventionally religious.

What’s your dream book?

A great ghost story. I’m going to write one before I die – or shortly thereafter.

Do you think the losses in your life have shaped your fiction?

Well, sure. If I’d had a mother when I lost my husband, or protection from fate (financial security) when my husband died, I might not have felt such a need to save myself … creatively. I felt that staying sane or returning to sane might not have been possible if I hadn’t taken such risks, such as writing a novel with no formal training.

None?

A semester in Creative Writing, the freshman elective, at the University of Illinois… and reading every good book I could. But no, I wasn’t to the page born. My family told many stories; but I’m the first person on either side of my family to graduate high school. Alice Hoffman and I – we’re the ones who aren’t sending out papers to Princeton. She dropped out of high school because she was just too cool. What a renegade heart.

How do you write with seven children?

I neglect them. They now understand this and have begun to forage for their own food.

But really.

The big key is hyper-organization. Each kid has a file. The first page of the file was every pertinent piece of information from the kids Social Security number to the name of the doctor, right there. Each kid has a memory box. We had an item a year, plus a folder of that kid’s best schoolwork, with a letter on the outside. We keep individual and master lists. We keep personal calendars and a mass family calendar for double security. But it isn’t an institution. I really talk to every kid every day, even Rob, who’s 22 and on his own now, working for the mass platform cyber-reality Second Life and starting school to do mass platform gaming. We e-mail five times a day; and sometimes the e-mails get philosophical. The other day at the doctor, I was finishing a phone call in which I was telling one of my sons, ‘The person who wins the argument appears to have the moral high ground but doesn’t, necessarily…’ and the doctor said, ‘It’s ten a.m.!” My kids complain about me. They say I’m ‘content-based.” But I love to goof around. Sitting outside with my kids and my brother, telling stories about the really nuts things that happened to us growing up on the west side of Chicago in the ‘60s, it’s the best fun we have. My brother, an engineer, is a better storyteller than I am. And he knows it.

You were open about having an identity theft.

I was, simply because so many people believe that if they are careful enough, nothing like this could happen to them. But I was ripped off by a relative and she later married declared bankruptcy and married a multi-millionaire. She has no regrets. But I lost two college educations for my kids.

Other that that, you have a pretty ordinary life.

It’s less than ordinary. It would be boring if I didn’t escape to stir up the lives of imaginary people.

What do you think of the Oprah experience?

Because I was the first one, my experience was different. I didn’t know it was going to be this huge, number-one bestseller, although I knew that Miss Winfrey could transform people into vegetarians with a sentence! And so, for me it was even more of a gift, a surprise and a delight, to meet people for whom The Deep End of the Ocean was the first book they’d read since high school, for example. It touched my heart that this book changed their lives. They call it the first of Oprah Winfrey’s ‘inspirational women’ stories; but The Deep End of the Ocean was filled with troubled and deeply ambivalent characters. It’s not Cormac McCarthy; and I don’t want to be Cormac McCarthy.

Who do you want to be?

Ruth Rendall.

What’s your all-time favorite novel?

‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ by Betty Smith. It’s always thought of as a middle-grade book; but it’s filled with truly gritty accounts of the immigrant experience, from death by alcoholism to the molestation of a child. How simply and elegant it is. It’s just simply amazing what she did. In fact, my daughter’s name is Francie Nolan.

Who’s your favorite male character?

Atticus Finch. Hey I have a kid named that, too! (Atticus Stuart Brent).

How about a female character?

Charlotte A. Cavatica.

Are all your children named after characters in fiction?

They are, except for my first son, who’s named after my brother, who’s only a character.

What’s your favorite thing to do?

I love to SCUBA dive, although I’m a little afraid to go back into the water after writing ‘Still Summer.’

What do you think the greatest invention of the century is?

In-vitro fertilization and styling gel.

Why have you begun writing fiction for young adults? Isn’t one genre enough?

It wasn’t for the money, that’s for sure! I love the chances I can take, the ways I can go dark and light. The borders aren’t so visible. It’s just too much fun to stop!

If you could change one thing with a snap of your fingers, what would it be?

Religious bigotry.

If you could relive one moment, what would it be?

Seeing my first son’s ultrasound picture.

If you could come back as anything other than a person, what would it be?

A whale. I just know they’re having fun, because things are much better down where it’s wetter.

What makes you cry?

Kirkus reviews and hearing my son Marty sing, but for different reasons.

What makes you laugh?

Hearing all the other kids sing Marty’s musical theatre songs.

Q&A with Jackie Mitchard about 'Still Summer'

Q. Still Summer is a real story of survival against all odds and above all against the force of the ocean – have you had any experiences that have particularly inspired this aspect?

A. I thankfully have not, but I do know people who have had experiences such as this one – and who survived. I did sail on the real vessel Opus out of St. Thomas and saw their videos of hurricanes and deserted and heard their tales. My only disasters have been minimal: I once was on a wilderness trek and suffered hypothermia when the temperature dipped to ten degrees on an April night. My hair and skin were covered with frost; and the three of us had to get into one sleeping bag to generate enough heat to live through the night. If there had been three nights of that, we would have been in trouble.

Q. How far are the characters in the book based on people you know? Did you have a tight knit group of girlfriends at high school?

A. I definitely did have a tight-knit group of girls and we did the American teenage girl things, including cruising a square mile – past the Italian beef stand, past the cemetery where Al Capone was buried, past the high school. We did absolutely nothing and felt so grown up! As opposed to other books I’ve written, these characters definitely are based on real people. Among those who are entirely based on real individuals are Lenny Amato, based on the real captain of The Opus, and Holly Solvig, based on my great friend, the Canadian author Holly Kennedy. Janis was inspired by my darling real-life cousin, who lives in America now but formerly lived in Swindon and who sailed on The Opus with me. Olivia also was based on a relative of mine. Don’t you wish she were a relative of yours?

Q. There is quite a lot of tension between the group of female friends in Still Summer – would you say that there is some truth behind the stereotypical bitchiness of only women together?

A. Absolutely not. I think women friends of long standing generally are very, very supportive of each other. At first, the tension is typical teasing, except for the antipathy toward Olivia – which is very real and has roots in personal history for Holly. Of course, Tracy, for reasons that would spoil the book if I were to enumerate them here, can never share that antipathy, despite how much she deplores Olivia’s behaviour. When the atmosphere changes and the issues are life-and-death, tensions ratchet up by orders of magnitude. But that would happen among any group of people trapped in a desperate situation. It happened on the whaling vessel Essex, on which Herman Melville based Moby Dick. They happened on the tuna boat Andrea Gail, which situation Sebastian Junger described so powerfully in The Perfect Storm. Although it’s a cliché, menace in a small space brings out the absolute essence of bedrock personality. That happens in any crisis situation. People are stripped back of the ordinary civilities when every decision has an impact on one’s very survival. Also, the friend on Opus had a long mutual history, replete with some pretty ominous secrets. Those secrets were Olivia’s weapons – her defence against the others’ correct accusations.

Q. How important do you think it was to the story to introduce each of the characters in the novel before anything went wrong on the trip?

A. I believe it was important, even vital, to care about these people. In the usually ‘thriller’, characters come onstage only to be threatened and die or be threatened and escape the villain, using brains or brawn. I wanted that action element for Opus, but also for the reader to care deeply about the fate of each of these people so that the book would go to another level entirely.

Q. From this and your other books it is clear that you have a deep understanding of the bonds between mothers and children, do you agree that this is something that can only be gained through experience?

A. I’m sure that it isn’t necessary to be a mother to understand that bond: Stephen King and Nick Hornby, to name a few non-mothers, know it very well. However, it is the primal bond, the only one that every human being is guaranteed to experience in some way. But so far as having the experience, I do have that, as the mother of seven children!

Q. The intensity and pain of teenage love is shown from two angles - both the concerned mother and the strong willed daughter - have you found, as a mother yourself, that teenage love is complex to deal with?

A. Oh, please! I have three sons aged 18, 21 and 23! The grand enchantments and the great despair have been part of everyday life around here for the past five years or so! It’s tremendously complicated to deal with because, although one has the long view, and knows that these passions are very real, they are perhaps the most intense emotions we will ever experience. That said, it’s very difficult to resist pointing out that they are often time-limited, because a mother fears the emotional toll they can take. And that said, if you want your child to marry young, the best possible way to make that happen is to disparage or take a teenager relationship lightly.

Q. The dream cruise takes a tragic and fatalistic turn which seems to point to how vulnerable we are to life's changes - would you say this was an important message behind the story?

A. I think it’s essential to be clear that the underlying theme of the novel is tenacity or fragility of the bonds between people who have lied in the assumption that those bonds are primary and reliable – easily defined – when they truly are not. But that’s only one recurrent theme. The Opus is a symbol of . . . well, if you will, the voyage that all of us are on. We assume we know the destination and if we thought daily about how vulnerable we and our children are, we’d never get out of bed. The title of the book has nothing to do with the season; it means just that. In a brief time period, so brief that from start to finish, the swimming pool is still open and friends who had gone off for holidays might still be away, lives can be transformed utterly and forever.

Q. Did you know how the novel was going to end before you began writing?

A. Yes, I always do. The whole book really is a march toward that moment of completion and satisfaction. It’s almost as if I think, this is what happened – and now I must tell you how it came to happen.

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