Jacquelyn Mitchard: Because They Waited for Me

Jacquelyn Mitchard's debut novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was selected in 1996 as Oprah's first book club pick. Now, the story of the Cappadora family continues in her most recent novel, No Time to Wave Goodbye. Today's guest blogger, Jacquelyn explains how book clubs inspired her to bring back the Cappadoras nearly a decade after the characters first appeared in print. She is also the author of several other novels, including The Breakdown Lane and Cage of Stars.


Once a week, maybe more, I "visit" book clubs.

I don't get the wine and the spinach puffs, the taco dip and the wine --- but I get plenty of eager questions and lots of strokes and laughter when I try to answer them (particularly if I have NO IDEA that I named a character in mourning after a grief-stricken Shakespearean damsel).

As the conversation winds down, however, almost invariably, I'm asked, "What happened to Vincent? What happened to Beth?"

A dozen years have gone by since readers met the Cappadoras in my first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean. But something about those people, their neighborhood, their relatives and their lives stayed with readers. They stayed with me. I never knew what to say. I didn't know what the relationship between the brothers, Ben and Vincent, was after the end of the book --- during which Ben was kidnapped as a toddler and then returned to his family by a road with as many hairpin turns as glorious vistas. I didn't know if their estranged parents, Beth and Pat, repaired their fractured marriage. I don't think a book has to answer every question to provide satisfaction and closure.

Then, even though I had another book nearly complete that one day will be published, I began the authorial equivalent of doodling with a story about Vincent Cappadora. It was a story about his mother --- and about the relationship between a mother and her sons that was patched but never really healed. I doodled through a few chapters. They weren't the answer. I doodled through a few more. They weren't right either. And then I found the answer. I found the story about the Cappadoras and those around them that needed to be told.

It was No Time to Wave Goodbye, the story inspired by all those nights on speakerphone with book clubs from Dallas to Duluth.

I knew the story. And I was scared silly.

Why?

Respected authors don't write "sequels." And --- at least by some, at least sometimes --- I'm a respected author. Of course, there are wildly notable exceptions, to which I'm not comparing myself. John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom trilogy. Louise Erdrich's return to the vast clan she first introduced in Love Medicine --- although many of her other novels, including one of my favorites, Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse, had nothing to do with that Ojibway family. And Faulkner's mythical county...well, that goes without saying.

So I began to think of No Time to Wave Goodbye not as a sequel but as a piece of a universe to which I could return again, if I chose to. The Cappadoras are front and center in No Time to Wave Goodbye, but there are other important characters who weren't part of the first novel --- who weren't even born at the time of The Deep End of the Ocean --- who are part of the action, the emotion, the tension and absolution. The way I'm thinking now, these characters may show up again, because I had such a great time suffering through and finally polishing this novel (I've come to love rewriting more than writing) that I don't want to say a final goodbye either.

I hope that book club members who haven't read The Deep End of the Ocean will take this chance to do so, if only for the chance to meet the people they'll come to care about in No Time to Wave Goodbye. But that's not required reading. One of the early reviewers who applauded the book had never even heard of me when she read the book and found the characters vital, quirky and deeply engaging.

Of course, it's to the book clubs that I hope this novel goes. I hope they take it to their hearts. And I hope that, then, they call to invite me (despite how much I'll want the spinach puffs, the taco dip and the wine!) and ask me all kinds of questions. They waited for the answers and they kept on asking. They kept on suggesting.

And this novel I love, that their questions prompted.... Well, I wouldn't trade that for anything.

---Jacquelyn Mitchard