There’s a sunny side to all this. When publishers fling new names at us (page 74), a few are usually worth remembering. In June, two first-rate new storytellers will deliver potential best sellers. Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean (434 pages. Viking. $23.95) concerns a Midwestern family that implodes after their 3-year old son is kidnapped from a hotel lobby and becomes the subject of a nationally publicized search. Don’t bother predicting the end: there’s a plot twist that’ll spin you around no matter which way you’re looking. Sapphire’s Push (177 pages. Knopf $20) is the story of an unforgettably resilient Harlem teen named Precious Jones. Precious is fat and illiterate. She’s been molested by her mother and raped by her father, and her story gets worse before it gets better. Mitchard and Sapphire (more on her name later) have written brutal, redemptive first novels. One’s about losing a child. The other’s about losing a childhood.
Both Mitchard and Sapphire sold their novels after writing fewer than 100 pages. Both snagged spectacular $500,000 twobook contracts. And both have had Hollywood knocking. Sapphire, 45, has said no thank you thus far. She’s not sure a white, male director can tell her story properly: “I don’t want a filmmaker to come in and make Precious look pathetic.” Mitchard, 43, sold an option to Peter Guber and Michelle Pfeiffer for $300,000, after they outbid Ron Howard. “Catwoman?” said the author’s son Robert, 12. ‘Cool."
Mitchard and her five children live in Madison, Wis., in a pale lavender house with dark lavender shutters. She’s a funny, hard-charging, unpretentious woman. When I teased her or disagreed with her during our interview, she would sometimes slug me in the arm. Mitchard grew up on the west side of Chicago. She was a newspaper reporter, wrote a nonfiction book about infertility and, in 1985, began a column about ethics and family issues for The Milwaukee Joumal-Sentinel.
In 1993, Mitchard’s husband, journalist Dan Allegretti, died of cancer. Friends told her to quit freelancing. To get a job-any job. To stop taking risks. “It was like they were saying, ‘Now, you have to die, too’,” she says. “And I wasn’t buying it. I didn’t want to show my kids that if something terrible happens to you, you become this timid thing. So I wrote everything for anybody to pay the bills. I wrote warning labels: ‘Don’t point the paint-sprayer at your face while operating.‘I put up with a lot of horrible rejection, but I wouldn’t give in.”
Mitchard wrote the first chapters of “The Deep End” at an artists’ colony, where she kept her notes in a Tupperware container. She sent the chapters to her agent, Jane Gelfman, saying she needed $10,000 to finish the book. Gelfman called her and said, “I’m going to tell you something that will change your life.” Half a million. Mitchard hung up abruptly and cried. “Wouldn’t you?” she says. “Crikey!” “The Deep End” isn’t a novel about violence done to children-it isn’t lurid in the least-but about violence done to the human heart. The early chapters about the boy’s kidnapping are as painful as anything you’ll experience without general anesthesia. My wife was so spooked by the novel (we have a 2-year old) that she threw it across the bedroom after 75 pages, tossed and turned for hours, then woke me up at 3 a.m., demanding, “You ask her why she’d want to write a book like that.”
Mitchard says she wanted to write about people who had to survive the unsurvivable. “If one of my kids died, I would go into the closet and chew on my raincoat for the rest of my life,” she says. “I mean it. Love for your children is like love to the 300th power. It’s like matemal insanity. My husband had it too. When he was dying, we were saying to each other, ‘It’s a good thing it’s you and not one of them,‘because that was the only saving grace.” Mitchard clearly doesn’t believe that if you think about terrible things, they’ll happen. “No,” she says. “I have the absolute conviction that if you think about them they won’t happen. I didn’t think Dan would get cancer and die. I should have.”
Like Mitchard, Sapphire has a gift for staring down her fears. Sapphire was bom Ramona Lofton, and grew up on military bases and, later, in Los Angeles. Her father was a terribly abusive army sergeant. Her mother was a Wac who abandoned the family when Sapphire was 13. “That’s kind of the deep thing in my life,” she says, almost shyly-a surprise since she is shy about virtually nothing. Sapphire is gay and lives in Brooklyn. She has an intense, musical voice. She smiles easily and likes to wave her hands around.
In San Francisco, in the'70s, Ramona became Sapphire. She took the name partly because the New Age was coming, and people were calling themselves things like “Opaline” and “Amethyst of the Seventh Lesbian Tribe.” But she also liked its feisty connotations: “My mother was such a passive woman. She wasn’t the kind of woman who could stand up and say, ‘F— you, I’m leaving, and I’m taking the kids with me!’ So the idea of someone who was bad and could cuss out men-that wasn’t negative to me. I embraced that!”
At 26, Sapphire tracked down her mother, whom she hadn’t seen for 13 years: she’d become an alcoholic and barely recognized her daughter. Sapphire lived in Harlem, worked as a go-go dancer in strip clubs near Times Square, studied dance, wrote poetry, did performance art. Then there was 1986. “My mother died in June,” says Sapphire. “And then a few months later my brother was murdered in a park. He’d been homeless for two or three years.” She pauses. “And then an aunt dies. And then a friend’s child dies. And then a friend dies of cirrhosis of the liver. Those were really dark years, ‘86 to ‘89 or so. But it was then that my writing started to change.”
In 1994, Sapphire published a ferocious book of poetry called “American Dreams.” She wrote “Push” longhand in two small blue journals while finishing a master’s degree at Brooklyn College. Maybe you never thought that you’d tear through a novel about abuse, literacy and welfare, but you just met take your eyes off Precious Jones. She begins her story like ’this: “It was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my father. That was in 1982. I was out of school for a year. This gonna be my second baby. My daughter got Down Sinder. She’s retarded.” You were expecting Terry McMillan?
When Sapphire’s agent, Charlotte Sheedy, auctioned off the half-finished novel, one potential editor asked if Precious was going, to lose weight and find a boyfriend. A few thought that the harrowing story line was exaggerated. Says Sapphire, “I put those people in the same category as people who say that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that Rodney King participated in his own beating. I lived in one building in Harlem for over 10 years, so I saw a generation of children grow up. This novel isn’t conjecture, or some studies I read. This is life as I observed it. You know what I mean?”
Knopf and Viking will each publish about 75,000 copies of “Push” and “The Deep End,” print runs that put Sapphire and Mitchard on a par with the likes of John Updike. Sapphire’s prose will shock some mainstream readers. Still, there’s a tremendous appetite for minority voices, an appetite publishers have been scrambling to feed. (Agent Eric Simonoff says the ideal line to drop in conversation is “I’ve been reading some great chapters by a beautiful, 21-year-old Vietnamese writer.”) Knopf seems to regard “Push” as a potential “The Color Purple,” a book college kids will be buying in paperback. As executive vice president Jane Friedman puts it, “We’re going to sell this forever.”
“The Deep End” falls in the tradition of “Ordinary People” and “The Good Mother.” It will appeal primarily to women, but then who buys books anyway? Viking knows what it’s doing. It advanced Mitchard $500,000 for two novels, and it’s already secured roughly $200,000 in foreign rights, and taken in more than $30,000 from the Book of the Month Club. Viking also owns the paperback rights to “The Deep End,” which should be worth a fortune since a movie tie-in may be in the offing.
So there are great expectations all round. Mitchard says she remembers feeling elated when she first heard that she’d sold her unfinished novel: “For a couple of days, I was like, ‘You’re the top! You’re the Eiffel Tower!’ Then I had a petite breakdown and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I have to finish this now.’ I was just back to being somebody who had to write something. Except that it had to be really, really good, because I wasn’t going to get another chance.” For new novelists, the window of opportunity is perilouslys.small. Lucky for us, Mitchard and Sapphire have just gone whistling through.
