Jacquelyn Mitchard reaches for heart and mind simultaneously, with both wit and nostalgia but never with sentimentality. Whether writing of gun laws and garage sales, the loneliness of the long-haul single mother, fear of gardening, or the late great American game of baseball, Mitchard stresses the personal stake each of us has in the stand-up drama of daily life.

The single mother of five children, she shares her own family's dramas and epiphanies - her own mother's tradition of optimism based on nothing, the early death of her husband, the adoption of her baby daughter - as well as the great wheeling issues that confound 1990s Americans every day.

If Jacquelyn Mitchard wore a T-shirt, it would say, "What are you waiting for?" Along with only a few writers of our time - Judith Viorst, Anna Quindlen, Erma Bombeck - Jacquelyn Mitchard is able to concoct a graceful blend of humor, vinegar and eloquence that reminds us that no matter how we change or how far we range, we are all "the rest of us."