Jacquelyn Mitchard

American journalist and author

Jacquelyn Mitchard is an American journalist and author. She is the author of the best selling novel The Deep End of the Ocean, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club, on September 17, 1996. Other books by Mitchard include The Breakdown Lane, Twelve Times Blessed, Christmas, Present, A Theory of Relativity, The Most Wanted, Cage of Stars, No Time to Wave Goodbye, Second Nature A Love Story, and Still Summer. She is a professor of creative writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Born and raised in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, Mitchard's father was a plumber, from Newfoundland, Canada, and her mother a hardware store clerk, a competitive horsewoman, and a member of the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa Cree tribe. She studied creative writing for three semesters under Mark Costello (author of The Murphy Stories) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She became a newspaper reporter in 1979, eventually achieving a position as lifestyle columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper. Her weekly column, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, appeared in 125 newspapers nationwide until she retired it in 2007. Mitchard is a contributing editor for More (magazine) and is featured regularly in Reader's Digest, Good Housekeeping, Hallmark, Real Simple and other publications. Her nonfiction work includes the 1986 memoir 'Mother Less Child' (WW Norton) and essays in more than 30 anthologies. Mitchard married Dan Allegretti, a reporter for The Capital Times, and the couple had three children (Robert, Daniel, and Martin). Dan also had a daughter, Jocelyn, from a previous marriage. After 13 years of marriage, Allegretti died of cancer at the age of 45 in 1993. After the death of Allegretti, while working freelance for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a part time public relations position at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she started writing her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean. She is an alum and distinguished fellow of the Ragdale Foundation, an artist's colony in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she went to write the first two chapters on the encouragement of author Jane Hamilton. Bolstered by being featured by Oprah, the novel sold close to 3 million copies by May 1998. It has been Mitchard's only #1 New York Times Bestseller, on the list for 29 weeks, including 13 weeks at number 1. The book had originally reached number 14, but after being selected by Winfrey, sales jumped.

In 2011, Mitchard wrote that she and her husband had lost millions of dollars and most of their possessions to investment advisor Trevor Cook, who was convicted of operating a Ponzi Scheme.