In my last blog, you can see just the edge of the chair that nearly ended my marriage.
My daughter is sitting in it. I’m leaning on it, because in that photo, I still have the chair, although for a while, it was the chair or me.
I could say it looks much like any other chair, but that would be a lie and make my husband sound nuts instead of only neurotic. We’re all neurotic, but he’s neurotic about furniture and paint. And for the past three months, we’ve engaged in a war over a mini redecoration that has been more sniper attack than all-out cavalry assault. It has not escaped our children’s notice however. Fortunately, it is not the kind of parental warfare that will scar them for life or even until Wednesday. It has proven to them only what they already know – that their parents have feet of clay and heads of bone.
First, a little history.
Personally, I couldn’t much care less what kind of furniture we have so long as it’s serviceable and comfortable.
My husband couldn’t care more.
It’s not that he has too much time on his hands: Staying home with four young kids and two old ones (and coping with periodic bouts of weirdness from the college kid who lives away from home) keeps him more than occupied. He’s great at it.
But also, he majored it art, which gives him the illusion that, if unleashed, he could create an environment that would have photographers from Coastal Living outside the door, clamoring for a peek. It is sort of like my belief that with a few lessons, I could sing like Kristin Chenoweth. But people need dreams the way they need champagne – not every day but once in a while to add a little sparkle to their days. Neither of us wants to disabuse the other of that dream. My husband puts up with my yowling along with the radio and I put up with the fact that he once tried 13 different paint colors on a wall before choosing the first one he fancied.
Generally.
The redecoration was necessary.
Chris had built us a beautiful house but the living room is as big as a full-sized basketball court. People actually use a room in the basement, the size of a bedroom in a New York apartment, to enjoy games and TV. In part, this has been because being in our “great room” wasn’t so great. It felt like being in entry hall of the Field Museum without the dinosaur. What I’d done was to buy little bitty Euro type couches and chairs that, in this room, looked as inviting and stable as doll furniture. When our family gathered at holidays, we got out ten folding chairs to supplement out things. And then people sat on the floor. It echoed because the rugs were too small and its focal point was a flat-panel TV, which is a really terrific TV except for being the only thing on the wall. The paint (which I chose in a fit of decisiveness after the walls had remained white for a full year) was too light for the size of the room, so what we had was a sort of hollow, uninhabited gourd.
We decided together to buy some substantial, although inexpensive, couches and chairs and make that room a place to gather.
And that was the last thing we decided together.
My husband maintains that he does not change his mind very often. He says it’s more a matter of taking so long to make up his mind that people have the mistaken impression that he’s indecisive. He had not fully committed to those couches when we bought them – so it was not indecision that made him call back and change the order from two couches to a couch and two chairs and then, three days later, back to two couches. It was part of a process of making a decision. Although even the storeowner suggested that my husband repine for a while before making another part of his choice. The designer who had shown us 400 fabric samples before my husband picked out one he thought he could probably live with quit the business and decided to go into health care. Chris was almost sure he could live with the couches and with the two end tables he had ordered, although the thought of the end tables was a constant stressor.
But the crisis was yet to come.
The falling out came when I fell in love with the red chair.
It was on sale, and it looked just the like chair in Blue’s Clues or the seating version of the teapot in Beauty and the Beast. In fact, the designer once worked as an artist for Disney. It was really, really red, with a black stripe, and I decided that I loved it. I bought it. I brought it home and my husband smiled and asked, “What is that?”
“It is a chair,” I said. “Isn’t it funny and different?”
“Did you buy it used?”
“No, but on sale!”
“You aren’t going to keep it, are you?”
I sank down into its huge recesses and said, “I am.”
He said, “It doesn’t work. It throws everything off.”
By then, we’d sold all the little bitty matchstick Euro furniture and I was able to answer, honestly, “But there’s nothing else here.”
“It throws off the idea of what should be here,” Chris said.
“I am going upstairs,” I said.
“We need to discuss this,” Chris said. It’s a family rule. You discuss everything before you go to bed or make an appointment.
I explained, “No.”
Chris ranted about the chair in the way a quiet man does. He appealed to my better nature. He pointed out to the kids, in vague terms, how ego could get in the way of human harmony. When I tired of hearing him and went upstairs, I could hear the ominous sound of Chris’ measuring tape – which he uses to express frustration. He was measuring everything --- the distance from the front door to the chair, the distance from the chair to the fireplace, the theoretical distance between the chair and two theoretical couches. Finally, he could take no more of my silence. He appeared in the doorway and said, “Ego! This is all about ego. You’ve ruined a whole room over ego!”
I said, “I just like that chair and I’m drawing the line. I’m keeping it.”
Chris said, “That’s so regressive.”
I said, “You’re probably right. I’m still keeping it.”
Finally, Chris said, “I actually have figured out a place where it would work.”
Heartened, I looked at his kindly face and asked, “Where?”
He said, “The laundry room. You could sit in there and read.”
“And watch the laundry go around like a dog,” I said.
“No, I thought I could make a nice reading space for you in there.”
“I don’t want to read in the laundry room.”
“I can’t live with that chair in the living room,” Chris finally said. Our son appeared in the doorway of our room.
“You’ve really talked enough about the chair,” he said.
We said, simultaneously, “You don’t understand.”
Our son said, “But I do. And Mom, Pop, it’s not a kidney transplant. It’s a chair. And you’ve talked about it way, way too much. You’re starting to worry me.”
But the cold war continued until I had to go out of town. During phone calls home, we softened. After all, we are a loving couple. Chris said, “I’m trying to make the chair work for you. It’s really not fair, and it is a kind of nice, unusual chair.” I murmured my joy at his kindly consideration. He told me about other ideas he had had – about an antique altar from an old church he’d seen that had been bulldozed he thought might be a nice thing to put under the TV. I wondered aloud, but gently, if he had thought about the ramifications of the TV being on an altar. He chuckled. Chris actually chuckled about a matter of decorating and pronounced me cored. We parted with a sweet signoff. Two nights later, I struggled through the door with my suitcases. Everyone was asleep. Happily, I noticed the chair was still near the fireplace, not in the laundry room. I considered how tolerant and kind my husband really was, how very red that chair, how blatant that big black stripe. I really had pushed his buttons.
Then I noticed something else.
The end tables that Chris ordered, sight unseen, trusting in the designer, had arrived. There they sat, casually tucked into corners.
They were shiny black, with a thin red stripe.

We heard it first in the taxi, the wonderful London taxi -- they can turn in the radius of their own length -- on the way to our hotel near Hyde Park.
It was to be the worst storm of the winter, and perhaps of a generation. There were warnings that buildings would be damaged, bits of coastline washed away, trees down and power outages. We had come from our own home, where the total snowfall for the year had reached nearly 100 inches. Surely, this was a mistake.
It was no mistake.
I huddled into my lightweight trench coat. Early spring in London is soggy and gray but not usually torrential. In coming days, I would wish I had gear more suitable for the Himalayas. My trip to meet the people of my amazing new publisher, John Murray, including an amazing editor, Kate Parkin, was a bit dampened, shall we say. As we traveled by train all over northern England for literary festivals given by libraries, we saw fashionable girls in double pairs of pants and green Wellington boots, their umbrellas not only blown inside-out but torn out of their hands entirely. With the help of the publicist, we booked trains that were immediately cancelled and, when we could show up for events, learned that we were staying in quaint hotels with sports fans made surly by the fact that the annual race had been cancelled the day before and they had to spend another night before betting on their favorites.
Among the people who did brave the weather to show up, the favorite question was why I didn't set more books in England.
I didn't quite know how to answer. I love England, but although of English roots on my father's side, I don't know enough about England -- although I got a great plot idea while there, even though my husband kept elbowing me to stop asking about it because he thought I was being too blunt and impolite -- to really "set" stories there.
I asked my reader friend, "Do you only read books set in England?"
She answered, "No, I read books by Janet Evanovitch and Patricia Cornwell."
"But they aren't set in England," I replied.
"I didn't say that they should set their books in England. I said you should," she told me.
And the whole experience took on this sort of wonderful-terrible Alice-in-Wonderland quality. Every time we turned on the television, we heard that the foul weather was going to be targeted exactly on the place we were headed the next day.
We had three suitcases the size of Volkswagens, and every bloke we encountered had a comment about them: "Here for the weekend then?"
"Got the kiddies in there?" "Planning on immigration?"
We didn't know we could have left all but one of the smaller bags at the hotel in London to which we would return -- in the U.S. that would have been tantamount to provoking a federal investigation or, alternatively, throwing the contents from an eighth-floor window. But as we struggled up and down the multiple flights of stairs from train platform to other train platform, I was reminded of the phrase about things being in the saddle and riding mankind -- which I believe did originate with an Englishman.
On the other hand, the few people I met were hardy and hearty, kindly and gentle. I loved being called "love" and "ducks" by total strangers, loved the cheerful attitude that a big pot of tea would fix me right up and, don't bother, the innkeeper would bring it to me. I never encountered the repressed, stiff and chilly English of legend, just people with a great deal of bounce and plenty of philosophy -- who were deeply interested in the outcome of our presidential election and hoped Hillary would win. They were gentle with me and my eccentricities, my bad knees and the toe I sprained (on one of the suitcases). They were charmed by my husband, one of the gentlest souls on earth, and one of those people who can't help slipping into the dialect of whatever person he's with -- be that person from Yorkshire or Jamaica. And so everything that seemed tiresome at the time seems funny in retrospect -- something I'd gladly do all over again.
In the end, the weather and the suitcases, and even the fellow who took off his socks and washed his feet in the next seat on the plane ride home, made for a good story.
There'll always be an England, fortunately. The flowers will bloom and the moors flock with sheep in the heather.
And I'll be back.

It's still a month before publication but teen readers are beginning to weigh in on ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN and I'm absolutely in heaven about what they have to say!
Here are some early ratings from "previewers" who must all be very intelligent young women...or else I'm just one lucky author. ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN means a great deal to me, in part because I have a beloved friend who has been in a persistent coma for more than a year now, and whose condition is much more severe than Maureen's ever was. Sharing these emotions of devastating love and devastating loss helped me begin the long process of healing (which, in some ways, will never end).
Please glance at my web page (www.jackiemitchard.com) and read the blog from last winter called 'Just The Way You Look Tonight.' You'll understand more about where all that understanding began.

Jackie M.

Reader Reviews from FirstLook
A heartfelt story involving two best friends, All We Know of Heaven tells the tale of when one friend has to learn to live without the other. A tragic accident has changed the course of several lives, and an even more devastating mistake muddies the water. The scarily realistic situations, plot, dialogue, and characters make the novel seem more like nonfiction. Readers follow the surviving friend through her recovery gains and setbacks, her love life, and her lessons on how to live after death.
— Hannah (Saint Johns, FL)

All We Know of Heaven is, simply, a great book. The detailed writing, coupled with the in-depth exploration of the characters’ feelings, caught my eye immediately. Jacquelyn Mitchard obviously has a talent for writing, and for a first-time reader of one of her books, I definitely cannot wait to read more.
— Haley (Pittsboro, IN)

Enchanting, addictive, as soon as you read the first page you become enthralled as it takes you into another world. It’s like you become the characters and feel what they feel, react and show emotions as they do. You can feel the emotion in each line, and it completely drags you into the world of death and sadness, love and loss, and you can’t escape until you reach the end. Even then you won’t want to put it down. I think it was one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
— Amanda (Britton, MI)

I love this book! Once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. It is such a touching story. I actually started crying in class as I was reading it.
— Amanda (Kandiyohi, MN)

An intense novel which was unique and profound. Memorable story that was meaningful and unforgettable.
— sharon (albuquerque, NM)

There are books that make people laugh, cry, and think, but there are only some books that can make you week for the happy and the sad or that can touch your life in a way that makes you look at the world differently. This was the book that did that to me. The message was strong and you can bet that I will have my friends, teachers and family read this book because it was that good. I only have one warning for you: have a tissue box ready next to you…make that two!
— Sara (Bloomingdale, IL)

This book is the kind of book you will want to read over and over and over again.
— Jazmin (culpeper, VA)

This is an outstanding book. It had me standing on my toes the whole time! It is a true story that tells you to never give up hope.
— Abby (west lafayette, OH)

I absolutely could not put this book down. It was a very gripping book, sometimes tragic and sometimes joyful. I could feel the parents’ grief as well as Maury’s pain and frustration. It was a very well written book.
— Monica (Amo, IN)

All We Know of Heaven is an amazing book, telling the story of a girl who survived all odds and made something of herself. It helped me realize that we take the simplest tasks for granted, but they can be a big accomplishment. It also showed how one girl lost everything, and yet, gained so much more.
— Cecelia (Ste.Genevieve, MO)

This is a very moving novel. After reading it, I honestly counted my blessings. We take for granted little things that we are able to do daily, such as feeding and clothing ourselves. This novel is very inspirational and brings to light how thankful we should be for the simple things in life.
— Sheila (Ste. Genevieve, MO)

All We Know of Heaven is a book with a sad beginning, but you can’t put it down. I found myself crying with the characters—from sorrow and from joy—through their struggles to overcome the grief of lost friends, confusion about love, and living up to their own expectations of themselves. The inspiring story had me cheering for the characters the entire time. It really makes you look at your own life and to be grateful for what you have, while realizing that if you put your mind to something, you’ll get there eventually.
— Lynda (Antelope, CA)

This is a great book; I read it in three days. It does a stellar job of portraying the lost friend, and the one who survives becoming a real person again. This book is about hope, trust, love, loss, repairing a life, friendship and romance. Jacquelyn is an amazing writer and deals with the intense topic very well. All We Know of Heaven is a great book, which I think everyone should read.
— Manya (Saxtons River, VT)