The Deep End of the Ocean

The disappearance of her three-year-old son Ben threatens to drive a wedge between Beth Cappadora and her husband, Pat, and transforms her older son into a troubled delinquent, until one day nine years later when Ben comes back into their lives

Jacquelyn Mitchard's venture into fiction with her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, marks the latest evolution in her diverse and distinguished career as a writer. A native of Chicago, Mitchard graduated from the University of Illinois and Rockford College and became a newspaper reporter. From 1984 to 1988 she was metro reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Her weekly column, "The Rest of Us," has appeared in the Journal for over a decade and will be nationally syndicated starting in September 1996.

From 1989 to 1993, Mitchard was the speechwriter for now U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, while Shalala was Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin. Mitchard has also been a contributing editor for Parenting magazine since 1990; she is a regular columnist for TV Guide and has been a regular contributor to such national magazines as Money, Self, and Woman's Day. She is the author of two nonfiction books, Mother Less Child: The Love Story of a Family and a biography of Jane Addams for teenagers. She has also written two screenplays with her writing partner, Amy Paulsen: A Serpent's Egg for cable television and Typhoid Mary for feature development. Her essay on adoption was anthologized in the Adoption Reader.

The mother of five children, Mitchard lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is at work on a second novel entitled The Most Wanted.