Jacquelyn Mitchard, THE GOOD SON: A Novel

[1:32]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zibby Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, moms don't have time to read books. If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology called moms don't have time to have kids. Check it out, and you'll hear from 49 authors about all sorts of things moms don't have time to do. All the authors have been on this podcast. Also, check out my TikTok at withzibbyandtrace, my other podcast, Sex Talk with Zibby and Tracy. Check out moms don't have time to write on Medium, and of course, my new publishing company called Zibby Books. And now back to our daily author interview site and a quick hello from some of my kids. Hi. Hi. Hello. Enjoy the show. Jacqueline Michard is the author of The Good Sun, a novel. She was born in Chicago, and 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 number one 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. Michard's writing has won or been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, the Orange Broadband Prize for fiction, UK's Talk About Prize, and the Bram Stoker Award. Former daily newspaper reporter, Michard 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. Welcome, Jacqueline. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss The Good Son.

[3:10]Jacquelyn Mitchard: Thank you so much for having me. You obviously have time to read. Look at all those books. Oh, you know, I'm actually staying with my dad right now. I can't. You can't claim that. I can't say Skyborg.

[3:22]Zibby Owens: I have to tell you, though, that when I started your book, I wait, hold on. I have to get to the first page. I literally read the opening sentence out loud to my husband, and I said, this is the best opening sentence of a book I have read. And I'm just going read it again. I was picking my son up at the prison gates when I spotted the mother of the girl he had murdered. I mean, how can you not want to read that book? That's

[3:42]Jacquelyn Mitchard: a great opening sentence. Well, I wanted to have I wanted to have a sentence that would, you know, you always try for that first sentence, you know that, that encompasses sort of the meat, the muscle mass of the book. And to put those two mothers there together in that one place was to also to spark what's going to happen, you know, what kind of conflict

[4:09]Zibby Owens: is going to happen there. Can you tell listeners a little bit about the plot of the book? Yes.

[4:16]Jacquelyn Mitchard: Thea is the main character and she has the task of helping her son, Stefan, come back to the community he left behind after serving time in prison for the death of the girl he loved since the seventh grade, Belinda. And he has no memory of the crime. He was so messed up on drugs that he doesn't know what happened on that night. But he went to jail when he was 17. Now he's almost 20 because it was for manslaughter. And he is coming back to a community that even his extended family are not sure that they want to have anything to do with him. And definitely, the community where he lived and the larger community does not want to know Stefan. There's going to be no second chance for him. And also the mom of the girl, who was their neighbor, they grew up together, has started a huge organization to protest dating violence. And so there are many pressures that are coming down on Thea and on Stefan, and she has mixed feelings about this. She's, in some ways, as anybody would be. I have sons of my own. You you're wondering, you know, how how can I'm the only one who can love him. How am I gonna do that? You know, how am I gonna do that when I know what happened? But does she really know what happened? Nobody knows what happened. Nobody remembers. So

[5:45]Zibby Owens: it's a mystery. I was putting myself in Thea's shoes. You know, I have two sons of my own. And just thinking, you know, what would I do? Like, of course, I would be driving every weekend however far she would go. Like, of course, I would go. And of course, I would drive through the snowstorm if that's what he wanted and, like, risk my life and do whatever because it's your son. But is there a point at which your offspring does something so horrendous? And of course, it's unclear at the beginning, for sure. Like, is there ever a point? Like, what could they do to make me stop loving them? I don't think anything, really. I mean, what do you do, though, when something proves

[6:22]Jacquelyn Mitchard: I don't know. It just raised all sorts of questions. Well, that was why I wanted to write about it because actually, I was inspired to write this book. I was speaking at a writers' conference, this is years ago, and a woman in front of me in the coffee line at this big hotel, I was going to get my coffee, she dropped her book and I picked it up and handed it to her. And having the personality of a golden retriever, you know, I said, you know, are you here for the writer's conference? Well, she was not. She was there to visit her son in prison, and he would be in prison for a very long time. And she told me that he was there because of the drug induced murder of the girl he loved. And he was only 20 years old. And she further told me, and there's a scene that's like this but not this in the novel, she went to cemetery to put roses on the girl's grave, and the girl's mom showed up. She was terrified. But they ended up holding each other and crying. And the mother of the girl said, you're luckier because at least you can still touch him. And I thought, how could I turn away from her? I sat there. They were introducing me on the stage when I came running up the aisle because I sat there with her for way longer than I should have. I was mesmerized by her, the majesty of her grief. And I had also when you were talking about this, not long afterwards, I saw a TED Talk by Sue Klebold, you know, Dylan Klebold's mom. And he was one of the Columbine shooters, And of she the audience seemed to be aghast when she said, of course, I still love my son. Of course, I wish he was alive. And it it it there one of the things that has been most interesting to me about writing this book and about people reading it is the absolute intransigent power of a mother's love. Nothing is bigger and nothing is and it's also unreasoning.

[8:29]Jacquelyn Mitchard: know, maybe all love is unreasoning, but certainly a parent's love is unreasoning.

[8:36]Zibby Owens: It's true. It's so true. Oh my gosh. I mean, the idea though that this woman just happened to come across your path, right? Like the message to me is like, pick up any book that I see somebody drop. But you know, that your path could intersect and that you were so present and mindful and like open to hearing someone's story, just like as you were walking to a big event, like here you are, this big deal author, could easily have just like rushed past. But like, you're taking that moment, took in her story. Now I'm reading her story. I mean, it's like, it's so I

[9:11]Jacquelyn Mitchard: wonder where she is. I wonder how she is. You know, I remember the hotel. I wonder if she still goes every weekend and if there's a way that she would know that. I don't know. I mean, I think about things like that all the time. I don't believe in signs or anything like that. I just know that if you would have been there, you would have done the same thing. You would have been unable to push away despite your own schedule and your own needs. I think no one had listened to that story before. And when I told my agent I wanted to write a novel about it, he said, Okay, that's all really interesting, but I have one word for you, no. Why? He said that there's no way that you could make those characters sympathetic. What? You know, the the bitter mother of the murdered girl and the desperate mother of the son and the murderer himself. How could you ever And I was aghast because I said, they're already sympathetic to me. I already have compassion for them, and I know that readers would have compassion for them. And if not for, like in my first novel, nobody liked the main character in The Deep End of the Ocean, and people thought she was really hostile and a pain, and she was. She was miserable and depressed. And people aren't always like, you know, dancing and singing when they're in that kind of a state. But at the end of the day, they understood why she was that way. And that's all I'm asking for really, is for people to understand what the nature of that kind of having to live with that kind of and if you're the mother of someone who has done something like that and who has no memory of of having done it, you are responsible. I mean, you may not be responsible, but you sure feel responsible. I feel responsible for everything my kids do. I I'm helpless to not. I even the ones who are grown up, you know, I still have teenagers at home, but a lot of my kids are not a lot of my kids, but several of my kids are grown up, and I'm still carrying a torch. You know? How old are your kids? The youngest is 15 and the oldest is 35.

[11:43]Zibby Owens: And how many are there? Nine. Nine kids. That I know of. That you know of.

[11:51]Jacquelyn Mitchard: You have the same husband? Yes. I have the same husband. Well, I was widowed in my thirties, and the first three children, I was widowed in, like, my late thirties. That's when I wrote my first novel because I just wanted to do something impossible to show that there would be a life after this for us. And I had three sons, and then my husband and I my husband now and I got married twenty five years ago, almost twenty five years ago, and then there's just a date that got out of hand, you know? Mean A date that got out of hand with six kids. Yeah. I mean, all my daughters were adopted. Two of my daughters were born in Ethiopia and then I have five sons. And, you know, it doesn't seem like that many kids. You have four kids and people must always say, you know, I mean, but it doesn't when you're in the thick of it, it doesn't to me, sometimes it seems like I have been run over by a herd of buffalo. Sometimes it seems that I can't imagine how people have one child. You know, what do they do?

[12:58]Zibby Owens: Well, I'm sorry I did know that. I'm seeming unprepared. Do remember reading that, and I'm sorry that I had to ask how many you had. I didn't know, but I'm sorry.

[13:07]Jacquelyn Mitchard: But I liked the look on your face. I mean, it was worth it.

[13:12]Zibby Owens: It was worth the price of admission when you have nine kids. I mean, that's I understand. I mean, yes, people who have one are like, oh my gosh, four seems impossible. And I think about nine. But I mean, you have such a spread.

[13:23]Jacquelyn Mitchard: Maybe it makes it easier. I don't know. Feel like the book is breaking some of the spread, you know, that they were some of them were already in high school and on the not on their own, but able to, like, you know, make their own dinner if if they had to do that or something when the youngest one was was only little. So it is a huge spread. And in big families like that, if they are the kind of families that where the parents actually wanted the kids, I mean because I grew up in Chicago, on the West Side Of Chicago, and there were plenty of the firefighters' family and the police officers' family, 13 kids. The mother was gone. I mean, she didn't know whether she was in town or not, you know? But if it's they kind of look out for each other and company to each other when they're especially now that they're older. Wow. Well, that's aspirational.

[14:18]Zibby Owens: I'm like just still hoping my teenagers could actually make themselves dinner. I'm sitting here thinking, mean, I hope they can make themselves dinner. I feel like at least one of them knows how to make breakfast. No. I'm kidding. They're not gonna starve.

[14:32]Jacquelyn Mitchard: Mean, no one does no one starves willingly. I mean, they'll just eat all the cereal. Yeah, no idea. I was thinking like, here I am, I'm like, could they make steak? I don't know, they've never tried. Oh no, probably not. Well, maybe. Yeah. But you would not recognize it at steak. Well, I don't eat

[14:48]Zibby Owens: steak anyway. I don't even know what I'm talking about. I'm sorry. Anyway. It's okay. It's fine. It's fine. I'm having fun. Okay. Well, more goals for me to teach. I felt like the eggs were an accomplishment. So I'll just build on that.

[15:02]Jacquelyn Mitchard: Yes. Well, scrambled eggs are a knack. There's a knack to that. And once they can make, like if you read any British novels, all they ever eat in British novels are omelettes. That's the only thing they ever have. So they're set up for world travel, omelets and full toast. We call them flat eggs. Right, right.

[15:25]Zibby Owens: Wait, Jacqueline, tell me how you started writing. Like, when did this start? Tell me about your experience with your smash hit, having an Oprah bestseller. You had a widow, three kids. I mean, oh my gosh. And now here you are with this book. First of all, what did the agent say when you actually came out with this? Is he still your agent? Yes. Okay. And he's fine with it. He loves The Good Son. Loves the book.

[15:48]Jacquelyn Mitchard: But he said in a number of places, in a number of interviews, that he loves those characters because I love them. And because the task of the author is to get the reader on the side of the characters. Even if you disapprove of everything about that character, you're still wondering, you know, what's going to become that person. I started writing, as I said, I was a writer of sorts. I was a newspaper reporter for most of my life. And when I was in my late 30s, my husband died really young. He was 40. I'm sorry. And it was terrible. Yeah. It was terrible, especially and I it was terrible. It was more terrible for the kids than for me because they had no idea that anything like that could possibly happen. And how old were they? They were three, six and nine They at the were only little. And it took a long time for them to understand that life didn't always hold some terrible surprise. Because he died very quickly, he got really sick and he died. I started to write the now The Deep End of the Ocean. I had heard a story in high school about a family who it's a very famous story, actually, a family whose child was abducted who, after eight or nine years, he was returned to the family. I mean, he went to a police station, and you know that story. I'm trying to think of his name anyway. And I wondered what that would be like because what's interesting to me in stories is the aftermath, not the beforemath. I'm interested not so much in the thing itself, but the way that the thing affects the lives of everybody going forward. And so I thought in the deep end of the ocean within the first few pages, the boy is back with his family after nine years, and they're trying to figure out what, you know, there are more tears shed over answered prayers, you know, than unanswered prayers. And so by the time I finished it, I knew it was good enough to get published. I had never done any creative writing, right? I had never done other than, like, for the freshman elective at the University of Illinois. And I knew it was good enough to get published, but I didn't know what would happen to it. And then it became a bestseller, and then Stedman Graham gave a copy of it to Oprah when Oprah Winfrey when they were on vacation. And she called me on the phone and I erased her message three times because I thought it was somebody horsing around with me. I thought it was one of my friends saying, This is Oprah Winfrey, could you please return my call? You know, when I finally called her back, she was really mad. And she said on the message, this is Oprah Winfrey, and I don't even know if you live here. But if you do, could you at least do me the courtesy of returning my phone call? So I called her back. And she said, I'm going to start the largest book club in the world. Okay. And even my publisher said, Now, Jackie, do not have such big expectations for this because these are antithetical media, TV, and people who watch daytime TV don't read. First of all, I thought, that may not be true. And as it turned out, on the night that she announced the book club, by that night, there were 4,000 holds on the book at the New York Public Library. Oh my gosh. It was crazy. Even she would have not imagined, she was not able to imagine how much of a hunger and thirst people had to gossip about books and see that's what books are for. Books are to gossip about. There's this say, Did you get to the part? You know, I can remember my mom was a she didn't graduate high school even, she was a high school dropout, but she would talk about books with the guy across the alley who worked for my dad, right? And she said, I heard her say one day to him, Did you get to the part in the train station yet? And it was ten years until I realized she was talking about Anna Karenina. Oh, wow. No one knew that she wasn't too stupid to read that book. She didn't know she wasn't too stupid to read that book.

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[23:19]Zibby Owens: I love that you said that about gossiping around books. I've been trying to I keep saying it's community. Right? Like, I'm trying to build this community, but and like word-of-mouth and all this stuff, but that's really what it is, is that you wanna share like we don't have enough people in common. That's why we have to talk about all sorts of other people, right? We have to read Us Weekly or like talk about celebrities and like, you don't always just wanna talk about celebrities. It's like, you know, enough already. But it's having a book that's like a moment that you all know you're all experiencing the same emotions and all of that. I don't know. I feel like we still don't quite have it. I don't know.

[23:56]Jacquelyn Mitchard: And also, I mean, when you have a book club, a book at your book club, like I have a book club, and when people read a book, they want to disagree about it. Want to say, oh, if I were if I were that woman, I would never have done that. Oh, yes, I would have. Well, it only it makes sense that she wouldn't have done that. Well, but she didn't really love her husband. No, I think she did. And so they were gossiping about people who aren't real as if they were real. And that to me is just that's what kicks my spokes out about books, is that these people, the beginning of a book and the end of the book are so important because at the end of the book, basically you're saying, okay, I'm going to let you go back to the world now. I'm going to release you back to the world. But you'll always remember, we'll always remember each other, you know, the author and the characters and the reader. You know, it's almost like a sort of a journey that you took together and then at the end of the journey, you have to say goodbye.

[25:10]Zibby Owens: That's part of why I like keeping books around because I feel like when I look around at all my books, it's like I'm checking on my old friends, you know? Like, because then just seeing it, it's like, okay, okay. Like I don't remember the specifics of a book I read twenty years ago, but I get all those feelings and like flashes and it all kind of comes back and it's very comforting.

[25:31]Jacquelyn Mitchard: It is to me too. I still remember the first time I read the book that I consider still my favorite book. And I was Wait, which is what book? It's called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which I think of as just this magnificent book about books. It's a book about a girl finding her way out of this grinding immigrant poverty through the fact that she could read. Yep. And it opened the world to her, and she saw that there was a different possibility for life than the life that she understood and everyone around her lived. And in some ways that I can still be brought to tears reading parts of that book, because it's so moving to me that reading, you know, when a kid realizes that she can read, then you can never keep her prisoner anymore. Right? Yep.

[26:32]Zibby Owens: Absolutely. I read that book in grade school, and I haven't read it since. I have to I should go back and read it to my kids, honestly.

[26:38]Jacquelyn Mitchard: It holds up. It really does hold up. And you think of it as this sort of little middle grade or young adult kind of book. There's a lot of stuff going on in that book. There's, you know, there's a pedophile, there's the poverty and the alcoholism and the parents battling, and, you know, and Franci Nolan, Franci Nolan as a character means so much to me, my firstborn daughter's name is Franci Nolan, that she is becoming something that her family would not recognize. She's becoming a different kind of person, and it's very inspiring and very gritty, And when I have read it again, I've read it a few times in my life, when I've read it again, I recognize the achievement of that writer.

[27:29]Zibby Owens: I think maybe some of that went over my head on the first reading. So, I think I'm going to have to go back.

[27:35]Jacquelyn Mitchard: Yeah, but that happens. We read books in our lives at different times, and we notice things. There's always something that's revealed to us later on that the

[27:45]Zibby Owens: next time we read it, Wow. Do you go back and read your own writing? Like, when you read your Are you kidding? Just saying, maybe if you read The Deep End of the Ocean Now, what would you think about it?

[27:58]Jacquelyn Mitchard: I've read pages of books that I've read, and there's two things that happen, and both of them are horrifying. Okay? One is I read something and I say, jeez, that's pretty good. I think I've slipped. I think my brain is going, you know, I I don't have the skill I used to have anymore. Or you read something and you think, what a pretentious jerk you are. Thankfully, no one is reading that anymore. Or or if they are, they're not writing to you about it. So, no, I don't read my own stories anymore, and I don't long to change them the way I was telling someone the other night that at a book event that when you have just written a book, it's like you have a great marriage and you're on your honeymoon. And then the book is published and then time goes by and you and then you're down at the the mailbox and you're kinda like flirting with the guy across the street, you know, thinking, I really like him. I think he understands me better than my current book husband. And then so you're ready to write another book because you're you're moving on to a new love, kind of. Wow.

[29:13]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. So are have you been flirting with anybody lately, or do you have another Yes. Book

[29:19]Jacquelyn Mitchard: I just got started. I just figured out the plot of a new book. And, again, it's not giving anything away to say what it starts with. And what it starts with is a woman who is a young woman. She's an underwater photographer. She's acclaimed in her work. She comes back to her home to see her father, who is widowed. He's 60 years old. He's a wildlife biologist. And the first thing she finds out is that he is gonna marry her best friend. Well Well, yeah. And that's just the beginning of what Yes, it's just the beginning of the complications in this story. So I thought, what if that happened? Oh my God. You know, but you can inhabit those emotions and sort of try to figure out

[30:09]Zibby Owens: what they all would mean. It's so crazy, too, because you just it's impossible to run out of plots, right? Because there's like an endless series of things in the world that could happen. And the novel is like a big what if, right? So you just have to keep going. Anybody who worries or thinks about it, ideas will somehow just keep emerging. You don't really,

[30:29]Jacquelyn Mitchard: you don't really yeah. There are only a couple of stories, you know, in the sense that it's either you're falling in love or, you know, you're getting in trouble or something or you're falling in love and then getting in trouble, something like that. But there are endless permutations on how it happens and how people get out of it. And are you still in touch with Oprah? In touch would not, no. Of course not. Yeah. No, we called and had trade makeup tips. No, I'm not at all. But I did go on when she ended her network show and started her own network. Mhmm. She did a series of shows with four people, I guess, who had been meaningful turning points in her first career on the Oprah Winfrey show. And I did go out there and do that. I think that was about five years ago when she was ending that show. And it was really fun. It was I mean, yeah, it was really fun. Nothing about that experience is anything I would ever change. People say to me, was it, you know, were you intimidated and do you wish you wouldn't have started with this huge success? And I think, well, are you crazy? Really? No. No. Everything about it is just fine. So what advice would you give to an aspiring author? This is going to sound stupid, okay? Finish your book. I have so many writers whom I teach and who I teach at seminars or in MFA programs, and they invariably say to me, I've started three or four novels. I'm about halfway through each of them. Oh my goodness. If you don't push through the hard part and complete it, then you will never have a story that will be published. You'll never you'll never feel satisfied, you'll never know whether you could have done it or not. And so that would be the biggest thing that I would say is make a commitment to your story and finish what you start. And also obviously read more. I hear so many people say, Who has time to read? Right? So many people say that. And if you have to stay up late, and if you have to never watch TV again, it's your priesthood. You have to read. You just have to read, period. I mean, I obviously read.

[33:04]Zibby Owens: Well, obviously you do. But I feel like the benefits of reading, even just a little bit, are so huge And people just forget, or they feel like they have to finish the whole thing, or they're intimidated, they have to read a certain book and they don't really want to, they're too tired. And I'm like, Skim the book, read 60 pages, skim. Like, just get into it. Just lose yourself for a minute. It's so much more effective than any other medium because it's the only thing where you're maybe virtual reality or something, which I don't know. I don't know. But it's the only thing you are literally immersed in something else, in some other world. Yeah, you're brain

[33:35]Jacquelyn Mitchard: deep in it. You really are. Your brain is suffused with that story. And that's why short stories are so great sometimes. Because you can read 20 pages, anybody can read 20 pages. And it's a digestible, memorable event that you can, that in a busy life or a busy culture, you can still

[34:00]Zibby Owens: make a civilized amount of time to read 20 pages and have that experience. Or even an essay, a thousand words. Sure. Even on the medium side, it's like five minute read. Come on. We all have a five minute read. Anyway, so I don't think your advice is stupid at all. I think it was spot on. Yeah. Anyway,

[34:19]Jacquelyn Mitchard: thank you so much. This was so much fun. You are so welcome. It was a great deal of fun. Somewhere out there, maybe we'll see each other someday out there in real life. Is real life gonna ever happen again? I don't know. I'm hopeful.

[34:34]Zibby Owens: I'm hopeful. Me too. I'm hopeful, and I would love that. That would be really nice and fun. And I'll drop books everywhere and hope that you come pick them up. Thank you, Zibby. Thank you so much for having me. Bye. My pleasure. Bye bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.