Pursuing and Capturing a Dream   

A top-notch journalist, happily married with four children, finds herself a single mother when her husband suddenly dies of cancer. Refusing to give up her struggle to become a successful author despite her friends' entreaties that she get a stable job, she writes anything and everything to pay the bills. Her work forces out-of-town trips and provokes cries of irresponsible parenting. Mother and kids cope with grief and hard times. But in the end, her persistent efforts to raise both family and career culminate in the sale of her first novel for $500,000, the sale of movie rights to the book and an offer to purchase the rights to her life story for another film. Oh, and somewhere in the mix, she adopts a fifth child.

Great screenplay, right? It could be, now that Jacquelyn Mitchard has decided to sell her life story to celluloid. When first approached about making a movie out of her life, the former reporter thought everyone would think she was "a real silly person." But then she realized she would have been silly not to work toward her goals just because she was enduring hard times. "I don't think there's any law that says you can say often enough to people to go ahead and try to pursue their own dreams despite the wounds that life inevitably dishes out," Mitchard says. "That's really what the story is about. It's not about me. It's about taking a dare."

The dare has paid off with her first fiction work, "The Deep End of the Ocean," which topped the New York Times' bestseller list in October. At around the same time, Mitchard's 10-year-old Milwaukee Journal Sentinel column, "The Rest of Us," which she describes as an "everyday ethics" commentary on family, cultural and social issues, was picked up for national syndication by Tribune Media Services.

Mitchard graduated from Rockford College in 1973 with a bachelor's degree in English. She worked for a year as a teacher in Illinois before moving back home to Chicago when her mother was dying of cancer. Her writing career began at the Pioneer Press, a chain of Chicago weeklies, and after a stint at Madison's Capital Times, Mitchard joined the Milwaukee Journal as a lifestyle writer, eventually becoming a feature writer for the paper's metro desk.

Married in 1981, she and her husband struggled with infertility, building their family through both birth and adoption. The experience fostered her 1985 autobiographical book, "Mother Less Child: The Love Story of a Family."

"The Deep End" was a totally different kind of book. Her first novel, it explores the abduction of a 3-year-old boy and its effect on his family. Ben Cappadora is kidnapped in a hotel lobby when his 7-year-old brother is watching him. Family and friends deal with an avalanche of emotion during the search for Ben. Mitchard's writing pushes the reader through the family's ordeal, forcing confrontation with fear and grief.

While working on the book, Mitchard, 43, confronted her own fear and grief as well. In June 1993, she lost her husband, fellow journalist Dan Allegretti, to colon cancer, just four months after his diagnosis. Ignoring practical advice and remembering her hus-
band's prediction that she would one day become "a writer of merit," she decided to continue her part time job as a speechwriter at the University of Wisconsin while taking on several freelance jobs that sometimes took her away from her children.

Her writing career "made it harder in the short run some of the time for [my children] because they had to give of my time in ways maybe they did not want to do," Mitchard says. "Especially because very suddenly they only had one parent."

The long hours away from home weren't easy for Mitchard either, but according to her friend, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel TV critic Joanne Weintraub, "She was able to use this tragedy to motivate her to work harder than she ever had... She seems to run on incredible resources of energy."

After a little over a year of freelancing, the idea for "The Deep End" came to Mitchard in a dream prior to her husband's death. The disturbing subject matter, coupled with the rarity of narrative dreams in her life, compelled her to pay attention. But to give the book a chance, Mitchard needed some focused and extended time away from the trials of her everyday life. With encouragement from friend and novelist Jane Hamilton, she received a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship to go to a writer's colony in Lake Forest, Illinois, for three weeks in October 1994.

When she arrived at the colony, she cried, intimidated by being surrounded by what she felt were "true artists" and insecure about the fact that she hadn't written fiction since college. "I felt out of my league and tremendously afraid," she says. "Because I missed [my children] so badly and so many people had told me 'This is irresponsible' and 'This is the wrong time to do this,' I thought I had to be very serious about it and make the time count. I worked like a maniac."

Her hard work was not in vain. In November 1994 Viking Press bought "The Deep End," along with the rights to a second book by Mitchard, for $500,000. It was published in June 1996. Before the book came out, in December 1995, Mandalay Entertainment and Michelle Pfeiffer bought the rights to the movie version of the novel, and Oprah Winfrey later urged viewers to read it for a new on-air reading group. Shortly after Oprah's praise, the book reached number one on numerous bestseller lists.

Critics questioned how a mother of five could write so graphically about child abduction. Newsweek senior writer Jeff Giles wrote that his wife, mother of their 2-year-old, read 75 pages of "The Deep End" and threw it across the room because it upset her so much.

Mitchard says writing the book forced her to face up to fears that she could lose her children, and she was confident that readers would benefit from examining their fears as well. The emotions evoked by the book's touchy subject matter, she says, were essential ingredients in its impact.

"There are books about divorce and children in trouble that aren't painful enough," Mitchard says, adding that the book offers positive lessons of redemption and hope as well as lessons about coping with despair. "I think of writing as the process of trying to be as absolutely honest with yourself as you can be. And sometimes that's not altogether pleasant."

Mitchard says she has plans to confront issues that hit even closer to home in a book about young children who lose their father. While the novel's characters will not be like her own kids, Mitchard anticipates that her children will be troubled by it nevertheless. In the meantime, she is at work on a book titled "The Most Wanted," which will deal with two women from different generations and the lessons they learn from each other.

For the moment, Mitch-ard is still overwhelmed by the response to "The Deep End," which she says has had an "extremely positive" effect on her life. Her children, however, still have mixed emotions about the book's success. Their unimpressed response was a warning not to "get too braggy and..go away from home too much," according to Mitchard. Her son Martin, 7, told her to get a job at the local Dairy Queen because it advertises four-hour shifts.

"If I could be happy with subsistence parenting or subsistence working, I'd be fine," she says. "But I'm not. I have this need to extend myself real far in both those areas."