Meet Shelley
Shelley Mickle grew up in the Mississippi River Delta, attended the University of Mississippi hoping to learn about writing from William Faulkner who lived next to the campus. After college, she worked in mental health because she wanted to learn how to create compelling characters in novels she would one day write, as well as to learn to help people live their best life—and especially to diagnose everyone in her family.
She worked in a psychiatric ward for emotionally disturbed children at Vanderbilt Hospital, which is where she met her future husband—not in the ward but in the cafeteria, since he was a Vanderbilt Medical Student. After they married, he was selected as one of eight interns to train under the renowned surgeon Francis Moore in Boston, and they lived there for eight years while he trained in pediatric neurosurgery. When he became a professor in pediatric neurosurgery at the University of Florida, they settled down in Gainesville, Florida, raised two children, and built their farm Blueberry Hill, named after the Fats Domino song, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill…” now featured in ITCHING TO LOVE.
Shelley with her horse Precious. Photo by Rob Witzel
Shelley with Buddy, the star of ITCHING TO LOVE.
When esteemed editor Louis Rubin brought out Shelley’s first novel, THE QUEEN OF OCTOBER, he wrote the jacket copy saying, “You are about to meet one of the most appealing young ladies in recent American Fiction.” Here in Itching to Love is the real freckled-faced young woman who grew up to create that appealing young fictional character. When her second novel REPLACING DAD was translated into film, one reviewer said it was the funniest story since “Auntie Mame.” Yes, Shelley is indeed funny, which is why NPR in Washington D.C. called one day to ask her to tell her stories on “Morning Edition,” which she did for six years. After many years as a novelist, she said she realized that to write a novel today, you have to be cool, and if she were ever cool, it has rubbed off. So she switched to writing narrative history telling our true stories with the grip of a sit-on-the-edge- of- your- seat tension. Her first adult nonfiction, BORROWING LIFE, about the first successful kidney transplant, became a book award finalist for the American Science Association, and her children’s book AMERICAN PHAROAH, TRIPLE CROWN CHAMPION, was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the best nonfiction books for children in 2017. Most recently, her 2023 narrative history WHITE HOUSE WILD CHILD: HOW ALICE ROOSEVELT BROKE ALL THE RULES AND WON THE HEART OF AMERICA has been a favorite for many readers and is in development as a film series.
Here in ITCHING TO LOVE she has written a humorous slice of her life, saying she intends it to give readers not only laughs but also a realization that their own lives are a singular magnificence enhanced by unexpected detours. Never in her wildest dreams would she have predicted that she would fall in love with a dog with yellow-snake eyes who refused to let her be owned by anyone else. In this short memoir you will meet astronauts, founding fathers, family members we can all relate to, along with many others who educated her heart. And of course Buddy the ordinary dog who sensed she was secretly harboring an unrecognized sorrow.
We are glad to have her back doing what maybe she does best: making us laugh.
“The epigraph of her memoir comes from writer Norman Cousins, who taught us that twenty seconds of laughter is the equivalent in exercise of three minutes of strenuous rowing.”—from HEAD FIRST, The Biology of Hope
Photo by Tom Rankin
Celebrated editor, literary scholar and critic, Louis Rubin with his good friend, Rufus. Despite losing the ability to hear women's voices, Louis developed the literary voices of many important American writers, including Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer and Annie Dillard, among others. He unselfishly worked with Shelley for nearly three years helping her to find her writing style and read everything she wrote until his death in 2013.