Heralded as a first-rate storyteller, Jacquelyn Mitchard of Madison, Wisconsin, sold her 1996 book The Deep End of the Ocean after writing a mere one hundred pages of it. The book concerns a Midwestern family, the Cappadoras, that collapses in on itself after three-year-old Ben Cappadora is kidnapped from a hotel lobby in Chicago.

Before Mitchard's success as a novelist, she worked as a newspaper columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Her strong desire to have children, a nearly fatal tubal pregnancy, and her efforts to cope with her inability to conceive and overcome the emotional and psychological aspects of infertility compelled Mitchard to write an account of her ordeal in Mother Less Child. In Publishers Weekly, Genevieve Stuttaford advised, "The casual reader may feel she covers the material too thoroughly, but those faced with a similar reality will empathize with the couple's plight. Mitchard writes frankly and well...