Word: mitchard
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Readers can now decide for themselves. Nearly two years ago, to inaugurate her now famous book club, Oprah Winfrey sent viewers swarming to buy Jacquelyn Mitchard's well-reviewed first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean; four months later, a five-year-old book by Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone, was anointed. Now, with nearly 3 million copies of each book in print, both authors are nervously sending their second novels out into the world. Unless Winfrey gives the writers another on-air boost, Mitchard's The Most Wanted (Viking; 407 pages; $24.95) and Lamb's I Know...
...first time around, Mitchard was a virtual unknown: a Madison, Wis., newspaper columnist and a widowed mother of five. Then she got what has come to be known, for a select group including Toni Morrison, Alice Hoffman and, most recently, Edwidge Danticat, as "the call." Says Mitchard, laughing: "It fell under the category of 'Who knew?' I was dumbfounded, honest to gosh." On her follow-up book, the hard part was to exorcise all notions of trying to duplicate the previous success. "The temptation is to just write something like, 'He had a hairy chest, she had big breasts...
Though the cash windfall was nice, both authors downplay the sudden change in their fortunes. Lamb and his wife, a high school teacher, are giving a lot of their newfound wealth away, while Mitchard was relieved merely to be able to pay some bills. Oprah has copies of their new books, but Lamb and Mitchard say they have no expectations that the star will pick them again. And it hardly matters. According to Pamela Dorman, Mitchard's editor, the author already has such an enthusiastic following that Viking has printed 400,000 copies of the new title. "Of course there...
...ever. When Mitchard finally returned the call, she learned that her just published first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, had been chosen as the initial recommendation of Oprah's Book Club, a new once-a-month feature on America's most popular syndicated talk show. Mitchard had no idea what this news meant: "I was so surprised that it really was Oprah, because there is not much of a tradition of writers on talk shows. Even as a writer I wouldn't want to hear myself talk about fiction for an hour...
Here is what the news meant: Mitchard's novel, an account of the sudden disappearance of a three-year-old child, sold about 100,000 copies before Oprah recommended it to her 15 million to 20 million daily viewers. Now The Deep End of the Ocean has become entrenched at the top of the New York Times fiction best-seller list, ahead of works by Sue Grafton, Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark, Scott Turow and Stephen King. As she watched her novel sweep past such household names, Mitchard says, "I felt I was having an out-of-body experience...