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BookGlutton / JackieMitchard
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JackieMitchard
mitch
Madison, WI
United States
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Before the Fall: Listening to Beth and her son together, the reader see 2 people, who, through Beth's late-blooming maturity and Vincent's newfound ability to empathize, might really bring them the closeness both have yearned for -- for almost 20 years. Small details of the lost years, when Ben was gone, and Beth was missing-in-action as a mother, emerge here in a poignancy that still breaks my heart (and I made them up!). Unlike Ben, Vincent is single and a loner. Ben has a wife and newborn child. His success is what he offers to his family. And then, that success if ramped up hugely. At the moment of a sweet, private family ritual, Vincent finds himself an overnight wonder. And in this moment, when they finally feel the most complete as a family, fate takes aim once more at the Cappdoras.
No Time to Wave Goodbye: A Novel
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Also Stranger than Fiction: Moreover, in an eerie footnote, Steven Stayner's older brother, Cary, became deeply troubled. Like the fictional Vincent, he felt ignored by his parents and then jealous of all the media attention Steven got when he came home. But Cary Stayner's downward spiral was devastating: In 1999, three years after The Deep End of the Ocean was published, Cary Stayner murdered four people in Yosemite National Park and now is on California's Death Row. Steven is dead, killed at 24 in a motorcycle crash. When I thought about revisiting the Cappadoras, I thought, what if the family continued to look great on the surface but never had to prove themselves as a family? That's why I wrote No Time to Wave Goodbye.
No Time to Wave Goodbye: A Novel
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Vincent and Ben: Just as between Vincent and his mother, the picture between the Vincent and his younger brother, Ben, abducted twenty-two years before in a hotel lobby before his mother's 15th high school reunion (the story in my novel The Deep End of the Ocean) is complex. It's not a picture in a coloring book, all bright colors and strong lines. Instead, it's like one of those hidden-picture puzzles children get, in which they have to find the comb or the seashell. Ben came home to a family he didn't remember. In fact, still goes by the name, Sam, that his beloved adoptive father gave him. When I wrote the first story about the Cappadoras, I had no idea that how deeply and how long the grief of losing my husband to cancer would affect my son, then only 10 years old (see http://www.redroom.com/blog/jacquelyn-mitchard/rehab-jerks).
No Time to Wave Goodbye: A Novel
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Stranger than Fiction: The Deep End of the Ocean was loosely inspired by a real-life kidnapping I covered in 1972 as a newspaper intern. Steven Stayner escaped his abductor 6 years after he was kidnapped, in part because he didn't want his child-molester "father" to put another little boy through the hell he'd put Steven through. I remained obsessed with that story, with the questions of memory's role in identity. When I was widowed, and looking for a reason to go on living, I thought, what if the abducted child was happy, not tortured? What if the burden of pain was on the older brother?
No Time to Wave Goodbye: A Novel
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Who Are These People?: One of the hardest things I've learned: nothing is more boring than a "bio dump," a spot in the book that's like a cast of characters -- who they are, how they look, what they do. As the audience watched the film 'No Time to Wave Goodbye,' I had a chance to accomplish that creatively. I used a counterpoint between the people in the audience and the people on the screen - the same people watching themselves as they shared their stories a year earlier. And while they watched themselves, telling stories of their children lost to kidnapping and never found, they were also studying the Cappadora family, whose son, Ben, was found 9 years after he was kidnapped. It's a complicated syncopation. Right there is everyone who will ever champion, benefit or threaten that family. The stage is set, everyone is on it. The other thing I always hope to do: Show everything, but hide in plain sight.
No Time to Wave Goodbye: A Novel
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Mother and Son Reunion: In Chapter 1, I wanted readers to know everything about Beth Cappadora's relationship with her son Ben - her reticence with him, her hopes and fears for this boy who is now a man - and about Beth and her husband and THEIR history. I gave myself just a few pages and 8 lines of dialogue between Beth and Pat to do all that. I had to go deep but not "explain" at length. Whatever else happens in the book fulfills that primary contract with the reader: I promise to show you what these people meant to each other in the past and how high the stakes are for their future. That meant putting them all together - the grown siblings and their parents - in the context of the controversial movie that Vincent made - and show that while Beth hoped to be at ease, she's plunged immediately into a tunnel of doubt and fear. The sub-context for all of them: Be careful what you wish for, you will
surely get it.
No Time to Wave Goodbye: A Novel
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
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