Jacquelyn Mitchard is a bestselling American author. She worked as a reporter before she became a novelist. Jacquelyn Mitchard holds the distinction of having her first book, The Deep End of the Ocean, chosen for the first book in Oprah Winfrey's book club.
The Deep End of the Ocean, published in 1996, sold more than three million copies worldwide and was number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Jacquelyn Mitchard has said that, with six children at the time, she stayed organized by keeping all the pages she was writing for the book in a Tupperware™ container. The book is about a family whose toddler son is kidnapped. The family moves to a new town nine years after the kidnapping only to discover their kidnapped child is also living there. Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean made into a feature film in 1999 with Michelle Pfeiffer, Treat Williams and Whoopi Goldberg.
Jacquelyn Mitchard's 2001 novel, Theory of Relativity, is about a one year old girl who is orphaned when both of her parents die in a car accident. The baby gets adopted by her uncle who is a teacher, but also a bachelor. Other members of the family fight him for custody and nothing short of a media circus ensues.
In her 2005 story, Cage of Stars, Jacquelyn Mitchard writes about murder, mental illness, religion and forgiveness. When a teenage Mormon girl's sisters are killed by a schizophrenic man, the family becomes divided on how to handle it. Ronnie Swan tries to sort out her feelings about her identity and her religion in the face of what happened to her sisters. Cage of Starts follows Ronnie's passage into young adulthood as she decides to try and find out more about the man who murdered her sisters.
Besides fiction, Jacquelyn Mitchard is also continuing her journalism career. She has a syndicated column in over 100 American newspapers. Jacquelyn Mitchard also writes for parenting magazines and has published article in publications such as Reader's Digest, Ladies Home Journal and Newsweek. Jacquelyn Mitchard lives in Wisconsin and continues to write and adopt children, eight of them, as of 2007.