If you’ve ever wondered just how closely art imitates life, you need only turn to one of the world’s superstars of fiction: Judith Krantz. The author of Scruples, Mistral’s Daughter, Princess Daisy, and many more, has written a memoir, Sex and Shopping: The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl. In the telling of her own colorful life, Krantz out-glitzes her heroines.

We caught up with the author for a question-and-answer session as frank as the memoir itself, drawn right from her descriptive book title.

BP: So, which is better, sex or shopping?
JK: I’d hate to think of a world in which a person had to give up one to have the other! On the one hand, shopping is dependable: You can do it alone, if you lose your heart to something that is wrong for you, you can return it; it’s instant gratification and yet something you buy may well last for years. You can browse to your heart’s content but it’s hard work and not easy on the feet unless you do it through catalogs or the Internet, and I like to touch and try on the things I buy.

Sex generally — certainly at its best — requires a willing partner; it’s not particularly dependable because it’s always different. Once you’ve done it with the wrong person you can’t take it back, it’s become your personal history. It can’t possibly last for years and browsing has its limits. Only a certain amount is healthy or wise.

I guess I’d have to say that shopping would win your horrible question. However I’d choose LOVE over shopping any day.

BP: What advice would you give your 20-something self if you were starting out today?
JK: Knowing what I do now, I certainly wouldn’t decide to write a first novel because I wouldn’t have anything like the necessary life experience. I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine. After I married at 26 and had my first son at 29, I continued to write part-time from home, but I always had a deadline.

My work caused me to interview hundreds of women about their lives and their problems. I think that getting to know so much about women was crucial before I started to write fiction to be read mainly by women. I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it’s such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

Otherwise I wouldn’t change a thing, and I’d advise a young, would-be novelist to do as many jobs and talk to as many people about their lives as possible. There’s nothing worse than the 25-year-old novelist regarding her own misspent youth. Live first!

BP: And what’s still to come for your readers to look forward to?
JK: It’s a secret.

Author photo by Deborah Feingold.

Remember when your parents told you you’d always treasure your teenage years? So does Mary Karr, and with Cherry, she debunks that myth with all the dragon-slaying verve she brought to her 1995 best-selling memoir, The Liars’ Club. "We all hit this age and get juiced on hormones, and our parents become gargoyles, and we ourselves become gargoyles. You’re not estranged from your parents, you’re also estranged with yourself," Karr said in a recent interview.

Cherry takes up where The Liars’ Club left off, with Karr, a scrappy kid in Leechfield, Texas, hitting the wall of adolescence. But where her first memoir focused on her hard-drinking, troubled parents, here Karr turns her gaze inward. Cherry recalls her efforts at self-invention, or, as she writes, "to manufacture a whole new bearing or being, some method of maneuvering along the hallways that will result in some less vigorous psycho-social butt-whippings than those endured in junior high. . . . By fall you arrive at school a whole new creature."

"I felt like I was strapping things onto myself," said the author, who retains a hint of Texan drawl. "One day I would want to be a hippie and then a surfer, then Emily Dickinson. You change a million times."

The agony boys endure as teens may not be easier, but Karr thinks it makes for a better story. "Male adolescence is James Dean and Mick Jagger and Kurt Cobain. It’s a celebrated form. It’s got dramatic action. For women you just hit that age, you begin morphing in ways that make you foreign to yourself. A girl’s feelings are so interior, there’s no language for them," she said.

"There is no language light enough to write about masturbation, passion, longing for someone else. We don’t get sexual the way boys do. You don’t want someone to boff you into guacamole, which the average boy at that age does, you want something much more generalized. It does have sexual feeling attached to it, but it’s less linear, less of a story from point A to point B. You want John Cleary [her enduring first crush] to skate over and couple skate with you. Those images have erotic feelings attached to them in a way most men would not fathom. I know from my own experience those things were very titillating."

To depict the precise feelings she remembered, Karr wrote a mountain of drafts and revised without mercy. "I just felt like I was wrestling a dragon. It was very hard," she said. "I probably wrote and threw away 500 pages before I started aggregating pages, and I threw away another 200 pages. Even to find the voice, that sense of estrangement from yourself, changes. It’s different in the 6th grade than in the 9th grade. I tried to give that sense of change with each age. I did it by writing it really badly 87 times, finally hitting on a noise that sounded true to me, and I thought oh, yeah, we can work with this."

One of the sections Karr felt she could work with describes the dazzle of first love and the sexual feelings awakened when John Cleary kissed her. "Some unnamed luster has rushed into your pelvis with whole swirling star colonies and nebulae, and to withdraw your mouth from his would extinguish that glitter and leave you shivering cold."

"I’m sure my memory is flawed," she said and laughed. "I’m waiting for someone to file a lawsuit. I don’t want to record every dot and tittle of my often pedestrian experience." Instead, she seeks the resonant moment and gives it shape through language.

Karr, who’s written three books of poetry said, "I’m invigorated by language. Poetry saved my life. Really transformed me, really saved me." The magic of words helped her escape a father bowed by "an alcohol-soaked heaviness" and a pill-popping mother who put Karr on birth control before she turned 15.

Filtering memory through language is "an inefficient process. It means spending a lot of time alone in a room. You get ambushed," said Karr. "I have to find the story within the story, to write my way to what is most true. "

That sense of truth, of resonance is why the memoir form has become so popular, Karr believes. "I think the form that reveals the most about a culture is the favored form. With memoir, there’s an intimacy, a sense of emotional engagement. People are lonely for each other."

If she remembers more than her friends do about that time, it’s because she’s worked at it. The process of memory for her involves filtering the past through the self she has become. "When you’re sobbing your guts out because you have to wear ugly clothes and your mother says you’ll look back on this and laugh — and you do. It’s that sort of looking back."

Though Karr still thinks of Texas as home, she prefers to do her looking back from a distance. Now a professor of English at Syracuse University, she left home at 17. She may not have known who she was but she knew she had to leave Leechfield and her family. "No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to," she writes.

She and her druggie bunch of friends lit out for Los Angeles in 1972 in a cross-country adventure she thought meant she’d escaped her past. It turned out Karr took a lot of her problems with her.

"I buried people," she said. "Many people of my generation did. So many of the people in this book died of AIDS, overdose, got hit by cars in the witness protection program, ended up in prison. It’s a happy accident that I am none of those things. I didn’t realize I had felt guilty until I wrote this book. I don’t miss anything about drugs. I don’t even drink. When I did that stuff, I drove into things and my life was unpleasant. There’s no reason I’m not dead. I feel I dodged a bullet someone else caught. I feel I’m way ahead of the game."

She has emerged from the past not unscarred but with her basic core, what she calls her "Same Self" remarkably intact. And as Cherry proves, she’s lived to tell the tale.

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Author photo by Philippe Bordas.

Ten years ago Edward Hoagland, who had been legally blind for three years, underwent a series of risky—and, ultimately, successful—operations to restore his sight. One of the best contemporary American essayists, known especially for his nature and travel writing, Hoagland had always been highly dependent on his eyesight. "My sense of divinity was visual," he writes in "In the Country of the Blind," the stunning opening essay in his memoir, Compass Points: How I Lived.

The loss of his eyesight stalled Hoagland's careers as writer and teacher, deprived him of the pleasure of walking—"one of life's centerpieces"—robbed him of his confidence and left him frustrated, occasionally in tears. The restoration of his eyesight rendered him "transcendentally gleeful." At least momentarily.

"For a year or so after those operations I was incapable of being unhappy or depressed," Hoagland said during a recent phone interview. He rightly believes his opening essay conveys this sense of exhilaration, that "it is an affirmation of the intense joy of life, which only people who have temporarily lost some part of their life can feel."

Hoagland added, "Unfortunately I couldn't maintain that ebullience. I think I tend to be happier than the average person, but I'm back to normal now, alas."

Well, not quite.

Another extraordinary thing happened to Hoagland during his period of blindness. After more than half a century of stuttering, his stutter almost completely vanished. "I still stutter," Hoagland says, "but perhaps only a tenth as much as I used to. It just seemed that I had to talk since I could no longer see. So I just started talking."

Hoagland's inability to talk easily with other people is a theme—and a fact of his life—that surfaces in many of the 11 essays that comprise the chapters of Compass Points. Such afflictions usually invite superficial psychological analysis. But the shapely complexity of Hoagland's sensibility defeats such easy analysis. In fact, one sure measure of the quality of a personal essay is how adroitly it eludes summary or categorization. By that standard, several of the essays in this book are exceptional. To say, for example, that a lively essay called "Calliope Times" is about Hoagland's experiences joining the circus when he was 18, or that the shaded "Entropy, Alas," is about the breakup of his second marriage, is to say both too little and too much. Like the best literary memoirs, Compass Points contains worlds within worlds.

But, still, those worlds were shaped to one extent or another by Hoagland's stuttering. His abiding interest in nature is surely at least partly a response to his difficulty in communicating with other people. In the chapter "Hitting One's Stride" he writes that the main reason he turned from writing fiction to writing essays was "the painful fact that I stuttered so badly that writing essays was my best chance to talk." And having to contend with the humiliating consequences of his stuttering seems to have allowed him to achieve the unflinching honesty that is the most luminous quality of this memoir.

So, Hoagland responds without hesitation or embarrassment to my question about the difficulty of writing truthfully about even the most intimate aspects of one's life: "For half a century I was hardly able to talk. The fact that my sexual performance was uncertain was really not as constantly embarrassing in all situations as not being able to talk," he explained.

"I lived in New York for 30 years. I was a published writer all during those years. My first novel was published just as I turned 23. My picture at that time was in Time and Newsweek as well as the New York Times. I was precocious as a writer, and I got invited to literary parties. But I stuttered so badly that I was sometimes an embarrassment at those parties," Hoagland recalled. "People would turn away because of my facial contortions, what I call flabbering. My whole face would contort and I would unintentionally spit."

"The only people I was able to talk to through all those years were two or three close male friends plus any woman with whom I was intimately involved. Especially my wives, of course. I didn't stutter at all with my wives," the author said. "If I did have a love affair, it was like having handcuffs unlocked and taken off. I was able to talk to anyone I made love with. So if my lovemaking left something to be desired, it was, in my view and in my experience of other people's reaction, more than made up for by the fact that I was suddenly able to pour my heart out to them."

In Compass Points Hoagland doesn't exactly pour his heart out—his essays are too well wrought for that—but he does write movingly and for the first time about his strained relationship with his father, a straitlaced corporate lawyer for what is now Exxon who tried to block the publication of his son's first novel and hinder his early career as a writer.

"He was afraid my writing would endanger my parents' painstakingly achieved social status to which they had climbed over a long period of time," Hoagland says. "Indeed, he specifically told me that it would destroy their social life, injure his professional career as a corporation lawyer and hurt my sister's chances of marrying well. And of course none of that happened." Instead Hoagland's father was congratulated on his son's literary success by the company CEO.

Hoagland also writes with passion, and growing pessimism, about the environment. "Becoming a committed conservationist," he says, "one also becomes—unfortunately—a pessimist because you start paying attention to the destruction of habitat wherever you are."

He advocates political radicalism and social conservatism. "Political radicalism opposes the forces that are destroying nature, such as rampant capitalism, private enterprise with no limitations put on it, no environmental limitations," he says. "Social conservatism opposes what removes us individually from nature, such as computerization, the dissolution of communities—human communities—and of course the destruction of natural areas, of nature, of habitat, and the dissolution of traditional social boundaries which fit human beings to live in nature, boundaries which involve altruism, courage, community and personal attachments."

Edward Hoagland, who turned 68 at the end of the last millennium, thinks he'll be most remembered for his nature writing. "Because people will want to know what these wild places were like when there are no more wild places. There will be no more wild places! There will be national parks that will be like glorified zoos. But there simply will not be wild places."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

There’s just something about Southerners. "When they start telling a story, they roll with it," says Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, who has told a story or two himself. "Their sense of timing, drama, irony is just beautiful. They can tell you a story and you’ll be laughing so hard you’ll have to lie down on the carpet. It’s the same way with the sad stories, and the language is just prettier."

The happiness, the pain, the rich language and the soul of the South are alive in Bragg’s new book, Ava’s Man, a profile of the author’s maternal grandfather. It’s the natural follow-up to All Over but the Shoutin’, Bragg’s best-selling memoir of growing up poor in the Alabama hills, the son of an alcoholic father and a mother determined to provide for her kids. Many readers of Shoutin’ wanted to know how Bragg’s mother, Margaret, acquired her indomitable spirit. For Bragg, the answer was clear: Margaret’s spunk came from her father, Charlie Bundrum. But Bragg had one problem writing a book about this fascinating man — he never knew his grandfather. "He died in the spring of 1958, one year before I was born," the author writes. "I have never forgiven him for that."

Without Charlie to interview, Bragg mined his own family for the stories he tells in Ava’s Man. "We kind of built him up from dirt level," says the author, speaking from his home in New Orleans. "Physical description, personality, foibles and outright flaws, we put ’em all in there — much to my Aunt Gracie Juanita’s chagrin." Charlie as Bragg portrays him wasn’t perfect, just real — a moonshine-drinking, raw-boned man with big ears and a bigger heart.

As a New York Times reporter, Bragg interviews people for a living. However, in his research for Ava’s Man, he found that interviewing strangers is one thing; interviewing his own family was another story.

"It was nerve-wracking," he says. "These are your people. You don’t want to say anything that will cause them pain." He also discovered a downside to the Southern art of storytelling. "They’d get right to the good part" of a recollection about Charlie and a dog, "and then one of them would say, ‘You know I had a dog like that.’ The story will take a hard right turn and that turn will branch off like a roadmap. It can take three or four hours to steer your mom back to where they started. There were stories they started I still don’t know the end to."

But over time and over tales, Charlie came alive for the author, who recognizes much of his grandfather in himself, for good or for bad. "Charlie loved more than anything else on earth the curves in living," says Bragg. "He didn’t want a long straightaway, he loved the unexpected, and I do, too. That’s why I do what I do for a living. He had a terrible temper and mine is . . . I wouldn’t say legendary but it’s pretty damn well known. He wanted to tell you a story, and I sure do love to tell one. I hope when I open my mouth, a little bit of him pours out."

Though the two share storytelling skills, Bragg differs from Charlie in other ways. Charlie was a skilled carpenter; Bragg’s brothers have been known to laugh when he picks up a hammer. And though Bragg is proud he doesn’t own a suit, he has never had to endure hardship like Charlie, who kept his family going through the Depression.

A devoted father who loved his seven children, Charlie "did the things you have to do to keep them. He worked himself to the bone to give them everything he could. I’ll take risks. He took responsibilities." It is a choice that Bragg, single and childless at 41, may never face himself.

In writing Ava’s Man, Bragg preserves not only his grandfather, but the Southern storytelling tradition that pieced Charlie together for him. "You can’t assume storytelling stops at the county line, but I believe we have a richer tradition of storytelling," says Bragg. "It’s deeper and wider. You can’t walk down the street without hearing a good story."

That, he worries, may change. Popular culture and gentrification are robbing the South of all that makes it unique. "The deep South, the South I really know, is just as endangered as the rain forest. Accents become more bland, country music used to be Merle Haggard who’d gone to prison, Johnny Cash, who had a dark soul. Now these singers wear hip hop clothes and Versace. Faith Hill and Shania Twain are beautiful but about as country as Siegfried and Roy."

If All Over but the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man have made Bragg the poster boy of Southern storytelling, he enjoys using his reporting skills to show the world how the South really is. "People assume racism has some particular claim down here. I’ve lived all over the country, and there’s no line of demarcation. Some of the most miserably racist places I’ve been have had nothing to do with the South," says Bragg, who then waxes eloquent about grits.

He wrote most of Ava’s Man quickly, passionately. He stopped cold as he approached the ending, where Charlie dies. "I couldn’t kill him. I tried and I tried. I’d call my mother or her sisters, [and say] ‘Tell me something that can help me through this.’ But I just didn’t want to kill him," says Bragg. When he was able at last to reach the end, "I felt a sense of loss I’ve never had. I’m a reasonably tough man. I’ve been shot at and beat up, but this was awful."

To compensate, Bragg added "my favorite thing I’ve ever written in my life, about if he had lived five or six more years. I would have known everything. He would have taken me fishing, bought me candy. I’d have known what he looked like, what he sounded like, his mannerisms, how he stood."

He would have been able to ask Charlie the question that’s been bothering him. "I want to know what he was afraid of. He did not seem to be afraid of anything," says Bragg. "But I don’t think he would have answered me. I think he would have slapped me on the knee or back and would have started telling a story."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Author photo by Marion Ettlinger.

I reach Oliver Sacks at a hotel in Ithaca, New York. Normally, the celebrated neurologist and author of such marvelously readable science books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat lives, writes and practices medicine in New York City. There he makes the occasional house call ("I like house calls. I think they're crucial.") and, time permitting, sees all comers as patients. ("I'm not snooty about seeing only certain exotic syndromes; I'm happy to see people with slipped disks, cricks in their necks or anything else.")

But for the next couple of weeks, until he sallies forth on what he calls "another neurological adventure," or until his publisher packs him off to San Francisco to promote his newest and most engagingly idiosyncratic book, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks is enjoying a sort of scholar's idyll at Cornell. "Yesterday I met with a botanist, a class of psychology students interested in color vision and a freshman writing class," he says. "Today I'm going to witness some high-pressure physics, and then there's a Greek mythology class."

With such a wide range of interests and the ability to write in interesting ways about any or all of them, it's no great surprise that Sacks succeeds in Uncle Tungsten at taking the seemingly dull topic of chemistry and turning it into a great adventure. In Uncle Tungsten it's Sacks' own boyhood enthusiasm for all things chemical that provides the narrative energy. Sacks writes with intelligence, passion and even humor about key personalities and turning points in the history of chemistry and topics ranging from metals and minerals to photography and spectroscopy. ("I've been investigating the campus with my pocket spectroscope!" Sacks exclaims at one point in our conversation. "I'm delighted to find that in my room here at Cornell there are four sorts of light.")

Sacks grew up in an exceptionally accomplished Anglo-Jewish family. His grandfather invented the Landau lamp, a crucial safety innovation in coal mining. Both of his parents were doctors. His Uncle Dave—the Uncle Tungsten of the title—was an inveterate experimenter with metals and lightbulbs (his nickname came from the tungsten his light bulb factory used for filaments). His first cousin was Abba Eban, former Israeli foreign minister.

While the chapters Sacks devotes to describing his family and homelife do not dwell on his inner life, he does reveal himself in bits and pieces: that almost from birth he was expected to become a doctor and that, eager to begin his training, his mother had him dissecting human fetuses by the age of 11, which horrified him; that his Uncle Tungsten and his more eccentric and intellectually forbidding Uncle Abe, rather than his parents, shaped and abetted his growth as a boy chemist; that he was sent as a child to a boarding school outside of London during World War II, and was abused by a tyrannical headmaster.

Overriding the darker moments is Sacks' unalloyed enthusiasm for the discoveries of science. Who else, for example, could rhapsodize so insightfully about the development of the periodic table? ("The feelings that all the elements could be elegantly and economically related to one another in terms of their physical and chemical properties and that they fell into natural groups and that there was also this mysterious periodicity as one went up in atomic weight was the most exciting thing I'd ever encountered," Sacks says. "It gave me strong feelings of cosmic order."

Sacks says he was a scribbler, a keeper of journals, from way back. Relying on the early journals and reconducting his old—often stinky and explosive—experiments, Sacks has sought to re-create here his boyhood adventures in chemistry. For him Uncle Tungsten is "a mixture of the reminiscent impulse and perhaps a pedagogic one. I would like to imagine that there are other 10 and 12 and 14-year-old boys and girls who find resonance and excitement in such discoveries. I want to retrace a journey into wonder."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

To the winners go the sports biographies; to the losers go the deathly quiet locker rooms, the self-flagellation, the proverbial kiss from your sister. As a result, we know a whole lot more about the thrill of victory than the agony of defeat.

Pat Conroy didn't set out to rectify that inequity by writing My Losing Season, a painfully detailed memoir of his senior year on the 1966-67 Citadel Bulldogs basketball squad that soldiered through an ignominious 8-17 season. Call it a requiem for all the runners-up who, like Conroy, turned defeat on the playing field into victory in other aspects of their lives.

As a fast, street-hardened 5-foot-10 point guard, Conroy was a fiery competitor who always believed he could play above his physical limitations and frequently did. Like his teammates, Conroy didn't lose well. Unlike the others, however, he found a way to learn something from each defeat that would make him a better ballplayer.

His steely resolve in the face of such a spirit-crushing season ultimately gave him the self-confidence to become one of America's best-loved writers. If losing builds character, Pat Conroy is your poster boy for also-rans.

"What was for these guys the worst year of their lives was in many ways the best year of my life," Conroy says by phone during a seaside vacation in Maine. "It was certainly the year I found myself, found out who I was and what I was going to do. And found belief in myself, which I don't think I ever had before that year."

Conroy was at a personal low point in 1996 when a former teammate stopped by his Dayton, Ohio, book signing for his most recent novel, Beach Music. On the cusp of the big 5-0, the author was in the middle of a messy divorce and seriously contemplating suicide ("I have a history of cracking up at least once during the writing of each of my last five books," he admits).

Somehow, reminiscing about glory days, even of such an inglorious season, seemed to lift his spirits. "The one thing I knew about basketball, despite how hard that year was, is that nothing has ever brought me joy like playing basketball," he says.

Conroy spent the next year dropping in on his former teammates, picking their memories to reconstruct a season most had worked hard to forget. Playing under a tyrannical old-school coach had spoiled the game for many of them; few had even bothered to stay in touch after graduation. "I ruined their lives reliving this. They were in agony talking about this year!" he says, letting loose his distinctive Irish chuckle.

For Conroy, however, even a dysfunctional team had been a welcome respite from the desensitizing plebe system at The Citadel and a horrific upbringing under his abusive father, the tough-as-nails Marine fighter pilot who inspired The Great Santini (1976).

As unpleasant as the forced march through Palookaville had been for his teammates, it paled in comparison to their apprehension at actually appearing in one of Conroy's books. After all, here was the guy who had rather spectacularly alienated his family with The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides (1986), and lobbed a literary grenade at his alma mater with The Lords of Discipline (1980).

"None of them have read a word of [My Losing Season]," he admits. "It tickled me, they were so terrified of it. (Mimics locker room chat) 'Look what he did to his f—-ing school!' 'School? Look what he did to his old man!' Their wives are scared to death."

They needn't be. All of the Bulldogs come off as stouthearted and true, if considerably browbeaten by circumstance.

One memory from that long-ago campaign left Conroy speechless:

"I remember the East Carolina game as being the first game Mom and Dad ever saw me play college basketball. It was a big deal for me. And all I remember was how it ended up, with Dad putting me against the wall saying, 'You're s—-, son. Your team is s—-, your coach is s—-, you couldn't hold my jock on your best day.' It was a horrible scene, and I was 21 then, I wasn't a kid anymore.

"To go back to that game and find out I scored 25 points stunned me; I had assumed I'd scored two or three. It shocked me. I scored more points than anybody on either team. And when I wrote that, when I saw the box score, I said, I had a father who couldn't be proud of a son who scored 25 points in a college basketball game. What could I have done to earn the respect of that son of a bitch? It simply amazed me."

Equally amazing, Conroy reconciled with his father before the real Great Santini died in 1998.

"Yeah, we did. I was surprised. I hated him so badly when I was a child and when I was in college that I thought I would never speak to him again after college. It shocked people when we became friends," he recalls.

Conroy's life has taken a happier turn in recent years. At 56, he's married to fellow writer Cassandra King, whose first novel, The Sunday Wife, was published by Hyperion in September. They live on Fripp Island near Beaufort, South Carolina, the setting for most of his novels and the one place on earth Conroy considers home. He's hard at work on his next novel, set in Charleston and the mountains of North Carolina.

Though he wouldn't want to relive it, Conroy says the trials of his youth helped him withstand the barbs of critics.

"I always tell myself, would I rather get a bad review in The New York Times or report to my First Sergeant's room after evening mess? The answer is always the same. I think that being beat up as much as I was during my childhood is a great preparation for being a writer. To be a writer in America is a contact sport. You've got to be tough."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a writer based in Naples, Florida.

Novelist Sue Miller’s beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease is such a unique achievement that it is impossible to adequately praise it. Or accurately describe it.

But for starters, in fewer than 200 pages, Miller offers a moving, emotionally complex portrait of her father—and mother—and their contrasting influences on her life. She provides a fascinating, if disturbing, description of Alzheimer’s manifestations in the brain and body. And, almost as an aside, she writes interestingly about how she transmutes and transforms observed experiences drawn from her life into events and characters in her fine, luminous novels.

What Miller does not offer in The Story of My Father is anything resembling a step-by-step guide for the perplexed. "I wanted to write a book that talked about what it felt like to live through the illness with someone whom you love," Miller says during a call to her home in Boston. "I wanted to write in a clear way about what was going on in the illness but also about the sense of confusion and loss one experiences in trying to respond reasonably to an unreasonable person who was once a very reasonable person."

And this Miller certainly does. The course of her father’s Alzheimer’s disease is central to this narrative. But it is also oddly peripheral to the heart of the memoir. The real story in this quietly amazing book is Miller’s effort to understand and even sustain her emotional bond with her father.

Miller’s father, James Nichols, was a respected church historian at the University of Chicago and, nearing the end of his career, at Princeton. A deeply religious man, Nichols was, says Miller, "incredibly considerate of other people, in almost an abstract way. As I write in the book, in a certain sense he considered everyone equally, and that was a problem being a child of his."

Miller remembers when she was a child sometimes doing things with her father and "feeling his shyness and my shyness and this sense of great effort and work being together, that he was working very hard and I was working very hard. I think that’s unusual for a little girl to feel about her father."

By contrast, Miller’s mother, a poet, "was excessive in all she did." She seemed to demand and absorb all the family’s emotional energy. Yet it is clear from Miller’s memoir that her mother and father were, improbably, very much in love throughout their marriage.

"My mother was very difficult and demanding," Miller says, "but my father loved her through all that. Once or twice he spoke a little sharply to her, but that was it. Those were memorable occasions because that was all, ever. I’m sure there were times when things were hard for him, but he understood life as a series of loving obligations. That’s what being as deeply Christian as he was can do for you—it makes burdens feel light. [He believed] there are few things which can give as much joy, as much meaning to life as doing something for someone else that you know no one else can do. I think my parents had a very intensely loving relationship."

Miller herself seems to have remained somewhat distant from her father until after her mother’s death. Ironically, she and her father began growing closer as Alzheimer’s disease slowly destroyed him. Since she was the sibling who lived nearest to him, Miller saw him most frequently and seems to have been the primary decision-maker overseeing his care. She describes his decline and her reactions to this decline with directness, intelligence, even humor, which lends an unexpected poignancy to the book.

Miller’s father died in 1991. For 10 years she struggled to write about who he was and what his life and death meant to her. In the meantime, she also wrote three novels that she believes were affected to some degree by her work on this memoir. The novel The Distinguished Guest, for instance, is "very much about the death of a parent," she says. And in The World Below "there is sense of the lives of the people we love who have gone before us running underneath our own lives" that derives in part from thinking and writing about her father.

Miller says writing the memoir seemed to prolong her grief. "I felt when I finally finished the book that I had finished something in myself too, that some way of being with him in my grieving was done and my sense of inadequacy as a caregiver was done. This is sort of an apologia for myself as a caregiver. I was still enmeshed in what I hadn’t done right while I was writing this book, and that was hard.

"I was so bitter and angry for a long time—on his behalf," Miller says near the end of our conversation. "The disease was just so cruel, particularly to someone who had lived by his intellect. What I slowly came to terms with, by really thinking about my father as I wrote the book, was that that was not a bitterness he would have shared. That helped me let go and be less furious at the illness. There was a kind of softening of my very dark anger. That is something I learned from my father, and from writing about him."

Jacques Pepin walks very softly in an era of the big schtick. He does not wham, or "Bam!" (although he is generous to his more flamboyant colleagues: "After all, Emeril Lagasse has done a lot to introduce people to food and to the fun of cooking"). He prefers to inspire rather than to dazzle and has been teaching at the French Culinary Institute in New York and Boston University for more than 30 years.

Pepin still loves to cook and says that "if I don't cook for two or three days, I get edgy." Despite his classical training in the kitchens of France, he maintains that he found his own style in the anti-artifice revolution of nouvelle cuisine. "My tastes have remained simple," he writes.

And finally, there is the sense of spiritual as well as physical nourishment that pervades his cooking shows. Here's a guy in touch with his feminine side. "I realized," he writes, "although I had worked mostly with men in the great restaurants of Paris and New York, the sort of cooking I was now turning to had been shown to me by women. It was the type of cooking I most loved." So naturally, the man Julia Child calls "the best chef in America" has modestly titled his memoir The Apprentice.

After 21 cookbooks, including the landmark La Technique and The Art of Cooking, Pepin has produced a characteristically gentle reminiscence of his "Life in the Kitchen," as the subtitle has it. It ranges back to his boyhood in his mother's various restaurants (and his escapades of stealing fruit with his brother), through his years learning sauces, grill techniques and stocks in some of the most famous restaurants of two countries: Le Meurice and the Plaza Athenee, Le Pavillon and his own Midtown Manhattan "soup kitchen," La Potagerie.

Public TV viewers who remember the video of Pepin bicycling to the market to fill his handlebar basket will be charmed to know that it's a sort of quiet tribute to his mother, who worked as a waitress supporting three small sons while her husband was off in the army during World War II: "[Riding] an old bicycle with solid rubber tires (no inner tubes) . . . she pedaled thirty-five or forty miles, going from farm to farm, filling the wicker basket strapped on the back of her bicycle with bread, eggs, meat, chicken, honey anything that she could find that would help feed us." With this background, it is not surprising that Pepin is a champion of food that is good from the bottom up, so to speak: fresh, healthful and prepared with an appreciation of its true nature rather than its "star quality."

"You know, a lot is said these days about great chefs, but not enough is said about the farmers," he said recently from his office in the French Culinary Institute. "Food should taste of what it is, as well as of how it has been transformed. Both things are worthwhile. If you have a nice piece of pork, and you roast it and maybe serve it with a little sauce, it has its own character. And if you add some shallots and some mushrooms and cognac and make a pate, that is also delicious. But it must have quality, and the cook must respect that."

On the other hand, Pepin is astonished at the wastefulness of modern-day chefs, and says that he was recently at one of those celebrity chef extravaganzas in California. "There were like 20 chefs, and when I went into the kitchen, I went crazy. A slightly wilted piece of broccoli or a bruised piece of basil and they threw it away. Frankly, I'd like to do a series on 'garbage food,' just using what most people waste."

His own cooking "was always pretty straightforward, but you have to remember that I started my apprenticeship in 1949, and we still had [ration] tickets for sugar and meat and eggs. A chicken was a big deal." The recipes that are scattered through the memoir, from a Reuben sandwich and New England clam chowder to braised rabbit, are examples of what he calls his "modern American cuisine with strong French influences." And yet none will frighten the amateur chef.

Apprenticed at 13, Pepin has cooked high and low. Having survived naval KP to become personal chef to de Gaulle before emigrating to New York, he turned down the position of chef to the Kennedy White House to take a job re-inventing the corporate kitchen for (the real) Howard Johnson. And he very nearly gave it all up for the life of an academic, lacking only the thesis for his doctorate in French literature from Columbia, even though he'd had to begin by taking English classes. He became a close friend of Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Alice Waters and of course the ebullient Child. He consulted on the creation of the Windows on the World.

Then in 1974, a car crash left him with multiple fractures. It was during his slow convalescence that he stumbled onto consulting, teaching, writing and doing television.

In fact, Pepin is about to tape a new series. "I wanted to call it, 'My Fast Food,' to show how to make simple, good but quick family food, but the producers didn't like it; so I don't know what to call it." It will be his 14th series, but the phenomenon of the celebrity chef is still a marvel to Pepin. "When I was coming up, you know, 50 years ago, being a chef was pretty low on the social scale. A good mother would have wanted her son to be a doctor or a lawyer."

Eve Zibart is a writer for The Washington Post.

Bibliophile Paul Collins finds a town that shares his passion If you’re reading this, you probably love books to one degree or another. For Paul Collins, author of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, that love is taken to the nth degree. His passion for all things biblio led him to Hay-on-Wye, a small Welsh village on the Britain/Wales border with only 1,500 inhabitants and 40 antiquarian bookstores. “There are easily several million books secreted away in these stores,” Collins explains, “and in outlying barns around the town; thousands of books for every man, woman, child and sheepdog.” Leaving behind a comfortable cosmopolitan existence in San Francisco, Collins traveled with his wife Jennifer and their young son, Morgan, “across the pond” to buy a house, settle in the country and make “The Town of Books” their home. Sixpence House is the result of that journey, but it is more than a delightful travelogue of the family’s adventure. It is the story of books themselves: how they get written, read, or not read, how they come into print and fall out of print, how they are made and how they are destroyed. And, last but not least, it is the story of how a young couple, their child in tow, became brave enough to follow their dreams. “I’ve always wanted to write,” Collins says happily. “Ever since I was a kid, that’s what I wanted to do, and I’m getting to do it. It’s wonderful.” Making life even more wonderful is a wife who has also been bitten by the book bug. “Jennifer is a painter,” Paul explains, “but she writes as well. She’s just finished a young adult book and is now to the point of looking for an agent.” While a quaint, obscure little village crammed to the rooftops with books might seem the perfect place for a couple of artistic wordsmiths, the idyllic setting proves to be a difficult place to buy that “perfect” home. First of all, the buildings in Hay-on-Wye are old, and secondly, determining the condition of a home for sale is up to the buyer. This compels them to commission, and pay for, an engineering survey for any house they seriously consider purchasing. “In America, you can pretty much house hunt for free until you get to the point of signing on the dotted line,” Collins notes, “but in Britain and Wales it gets very expensive very quickly.” Tagging along from an armchair on this side of the pond, however, is great fun for the reader: “Heavy oak floorboards creak beneath our feet,” Collins writes, “immediately to our left is a dark and crowded stairwell. This is a weighty structure, the sort of moany old house under constant compression by the very years themselves; it is not airy.” Collins describes the kitchen of this particular house with his characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor as “distinctly of 1950 vintage; you half expect an Angry Young Man with a Yorkshire accent to step out and start yelling about working down in the bloody mines.” In storybook fashion, as their money supply dwindles Collins gets a job working for the self-proclaimed “King of Hay,” a man named Richard Booth, a book dealer and the owner of Hay Castle where Collins finds himself employed to sort through a veritable realm of books. The task is daunting, but the job does allow him to pursue one of his favorite pastimes: meandering from one idea to another. “I’m always going off on tangents,” he admits. “I see something and I go, ‘Oh, that looks interesting,’ and in the process of tracking one story I end up finding five others. So I’m never lacking for material. But because of that, I have a hard time imagining myself writing a strictly single subject book. I’ve decided that’s not what my talent is in. It’s more in throwing myself out there in several directions and hoping that other people will find it interesting as well.” His first book, Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen People Who Didn’t Change the World, capitalized on that same talent. “I guess I have a short attention span,” he says, laughing. “Any one of those 13 people could have warranted a book, but I’d rather write about the 13 and let someone else write about one particular person.” This meandering method works well for Sixpence House. It allows the author to wander off the path, stopping for an anecdote here, a poignant moment there; it allows him time to dust off a book for us, and let us glimpse the ideas and emotions of someone long-forgotten, their words, held in ink, still able to move our minds and hearts; it allows him to tell us stories within his story and to make a quiet, but undeniable statement about the power, the endurance, and the magic of books. But how does a bibliophile feel about computers? “I think computers are a blessing and a headache,” Collins says. “I use computers and databases a lot in my historical research. They’re a tremendous tool, but on the other hand, you have to know what you’re looking for in the first place. And they’re a very unstable medium.” But with Sixpence House written and another book in the works, Paul Collins feels good about the future of his obsession and his livelihood. “Paper lasts for hundreds of years,” he says confidently. “I think books are here to stay. Not only do they have an aesthetic pleasure to them, they’re cheap, they’re portable, and they last a long time.” That should make any lover of books sleep a little more soundly tonight! Linda Stankard is a writer in New York.

As preface to his remarkably honest memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, best-selling novelist E. Lynn Harris offers this epigram: "Work like you don’t need the money, dance like nobody is watching and love like you’ve never been hurt."

Similar grand passions sweep across the pages and back through the years as the ebullient Harris recounts his former double life: by day, the quintessential "buppie," pulling down big bucks as an IBM computer salesman; by night, a closeted gay man searching for storybook love in the callous shadows of the urban club scene.

Hard work, a passion for soul music and the staunch resolve to remain a hopeless romantic enabled him to overcome depression, a suicide attempt and the loss of numerous friends to AIDS. His is a cautionary tale about a cautionless time, an era that fortunately allowed gentle souls such as Harris a few bad choices. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted is not a question here, but an affirmation, perhaps even a prayer.

Not many new writers would have the audacity to offer up their memoirs at the tender age of 48. Then again, Harris’ life has been far from ordinary and closer in truth to his eight larger-than-life multiracial, multi-sexual romances, including Invisible Life (1991), Abide with Me (1999) and Any Way the Wind Blows (2001). Harris actually embarked upon his memoirs seven years earlier, both to exorcise his demons and to satisfy fans curious to know where his real life ends and his fiction begins.

"Even as I was spending the last seven years going through my past, people kept saying, why now?" he says by phone from his Atlanta home. "It was very difficult because every time I would go back and write it and read what I had written, I had to relive that part of my life, where now life is so good. I guess that makes you stronger in a lot of ways."

Growing up poor in the shadow of his abusive stepfather Ben in Little Rock, Arkansas, Harris developed an early ability to turn adversity into advantage, lemons into lemonade. The temperamental Ben always called him Mike, after a neighborhood tough, preferring it to his "sissy" given name, Everette Lynn. Harris recounts one Easter when Ben went into a rage and ripped the boy’s brand new Sunday suit because he had buttoned the jacket "like a little girl." His mother and three sisters, dressed in their Easter finery, could only look on in horror.

"At some point in each of our lives we realize that life is not necessarily going to be fair," the author says. "That was the day for me that I knew I was going to have to pick up some skills to survive." When life got messy, he would retreat into the refuge of his imagination, a lush, passionate world far removed from Little Rock. One of the first black students to attend the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the gregarious Harris excelled, becoming the first black cheerleader and yearbook editor. After graduation, IBM recruited him for a sales position in Dallas, where he was once again the oddity, a young black liberal arts grad in an office of older white engineers. It was another world, a white heterosexual world, but one he would conquer with his natural salesmanship. He set his sights on a six-figure salary by age 29; he achieved it at 26.

Harris recalls being suddenly assigned to host two corporate CEOs on a high-stakes junket to San Francisco, a mission for which he was woefully unprepared at 23. Halfway through the first-class flight west, he turned to the two industry titans and admitted that he didn’t have a clue about what he was doing.

"It really helped me a lot because they taught me and they had a great time," he says.

By day, Harris was a straight arrow; by night, he was carefully exploring the gay bars wherever he found himself: Dallas, New York, Washington, D.C. It was the height of the disco era. Although Harris loved the nightlife, it didn’t love him back.

"One of the group used to jokingly refer to me as such a Mary Tyler Moore-type of person, and that was from my Southern upbringing," he says. "Everybody wanted me to be their little brother; they wanted me as a friend. I don’t know if it was the angels protecting me but a lot of these men that I would have jumped at the chance to be intimate with later died [of AIDS]."

"I was basically still trying to be Mr. All-American who just happened to be gay; I mean, the things that I was interested in sports, the theater and dating I wanted it to be romantic. And I kept getting messages like, hey, you don’t get to be romantic in this life. I just could not believe it was all about sex."

The high life did offer temporary relief from chronic depression, but at a heavy cost. Shortly after his 1990 suicide attempt, Harris sobered up, moved to Atlanta and began writing a fictionalized account of his life as a gay black man. When his manuscript for Invisible Life elicited no response from New York publishers, he published it himself and shrewdly placed it in beauty parlors and bookstores where he knew he would find an audience for his thoroughly modern romances.

"Some people can’t understand women going crazy over me at my signings, almost like a rock star, knowing my sexuality. I think it’s because they know my heart and we’ve been through a lot of the same things together."

Harris applauds the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay rights and the growing acceptance of gay marriage.

"I think that the move by the Supreme Court is a real relief. I just hope that people will take it slow. Sometimes so much injury can be done when people feel they are being forced to do something or accept something. I think it’s hard for straight people to understand what it’s like to be gay, but I think more of them are willing to open their minds about the individuals."

If he could, would he change his sexual preference? "No. Ask me that three or four years ago, it might have been different. If a genie came and granted me a wish of not being gay, would I take it? Yes, if it was a genie, because that would be fantasy. If God came, I would say no because that is obviously the way he wanted me."

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

Amy Tan had fervidly hoped to publish her fifth novel this fall, but fate would not allow it. Tan, who exploded onto the world literary stage with The Joy Luck Club in 1989, had just returned from a four-month worldwide tour in June 2001 promoting her fourth best-selling novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, when she knew something was very, very wrong. She was plagued by insomnia and an overwhelming sense of dread. Her body shook from an internal vibration she came to refer to as "Dolby Digital Syndrome." She could not read, write or follow the thread of dinner conversations.

Doctors ultimately diagnosed and removed a tumor on her adrenal gland. Her Dolby buzz subsided, only to be replaced by full-blown hallucinations, once a week at first, eventually every day. Some days, she couldn’t remember her own phone number or even her name.

That’s when fate, or something like it, took an unlikely form: Madonna.

In November 2002, Tan was scheduled to debut a new musical number, "Material Girl," with The Rock Bottom Remainders, the all-author rock band that includes Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Barbara Kingsolver and Dave Barry, among others. The Remainders previously had used Tan’s limited vocal abilities to comedic effect on the Nancy Sinatra chestnut, "These Boots Were Made for Walkin’," with the diminutive Tan decked out in full dominatrix garb. In her new spotlight turn, she planned to one-up Madonna in the guise of a money-grubbing Enron wife.

After 13 hours of study, she could not remember even the first line of the song. Her band mates downplayed it—hey, everybody has their "half-heimers" episodes—and she eventually read her way through the number onstage.

"That was a really scary moment," she admits by phone from her San Francisco home. "I knew there was something desperately wrong with my brain right then, that realization that you know it’s Alzheimer’s or you’re losing your mind or you’re going to be a dimwit."

In fact, Tan had unknowingly contracted Lyme disease, the degenerative tick-born illness, three years earlier, shortly before her mother’s death.

Its effects have been devastating on Tan’s ability to distill her life experiences into the funny, moving portraits of mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American experience for which she is known worldwide. She has learned how to move her story ahead on the good days and resist tinkering with every sentence the way she still loves to do.

"What I feel I have to do now, when my mind is clear, is just get the story out, the continuity, because that’s what I find very, very difficult on days when my brain is clogged, which comes from brain inflammation," she says. "I have a hard time with continuity, with segues and keeping pieces together. It feels like I have 12 pieces of fruit and vegetables being thrown in the air and trying to juggle them all. It’s overwhelming."

When it was clear that no novel would be forthcoming this year, Tan’s editor suggested publishing a collection of pieces she’d already written. To the author’s surprise, a search turned up numerous essays, speeches and the like.

The problem was, Tan has a strong distaste for "hodge-podge collections" that have no unifying theme. But as fate would have it, she had just recently recognized the common thread running through her own work.

"It has to do with my upbringing with a father who very strongly believed in faith as a Baptist minister, and my mother, who very strongly believed in fate, and I’m trying to find things that work for me."

She proposed a collection based upon her lifelong search for a philosophical middle ground between faith and fate, to be called The Opposite of Fate. When her puzzled editor asked her what the opposite of fate might be, Tan cryptically replied, "Exactly!"

The Opposite of Fate captures a life fully lived in 32 chapters, from Tan’s award-winning essay at age 8 to her unlikely adolescence in Switzerland (her first day on skis, she almost collided with the Queen of Sweden) to the ghost in her San Francisco condo who whistles the theme to Jeopardy to the filming of The Joy Luck Club and Tan’s amusement at encountering the Cliff Notes edition of her first novel.

Pivotal in Tan’s life and career were her mother, a complex, neurotic pessimist who believed in ghosts and spirits; her father and brother, who died within months of each other from brain tumors; the death of a close friend whose voice spoke to her for months after his murder, and the Remainders, who showed her how to boogie.

Tan calls The Opposite of Fate "a book of musings" rather than an actual memoir. That designation is a fair compromise to describe this loose and rambling autobiography that is weighted heavily toward the things that matter most to Tan.

"I’ve only had one life and these are the aspects of my life that I continue to dwell upon," she explains. "We as writers, when we talk about what our oeuvre is, we go back to the same questions and the same pivotal moments in our lives and they become the themes in our writing."

Tan doesn’t blame her illness on fate, despite her mother’s daily warnings of a curse on the family, but she does allow that such a curse did exist "because my mother strongly believed in it and she passed it on to my brother and me."

An equally strong belief in free will and self-determinism that she inherited from her father helped Tan "take that attitude of a curse into one of extreme good luck. I have been so incredibly lucky in life, beyond what I ever would have wished."

These days, Tan is wishing for more clear days. They will find her racing ahead with her uplifting stories of family foibles and the precarious yin-yang of the Chinese-American experience, or perhaps skiing down the gentle slopes of Squaw Valley and Vail.

This month, she plans to be back on stage with the Remainders in Austin, Texas, knee-high boots and leather whip at the ready, to show that Texas Book Fair crowd just what this literary dominatrix is made of.

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

When the family maid took seven-year-old Marshall Chapman to see Elvis Presley in concert, the wide-eyed daughter of a prosperous Spartanburg, South Carolina, textile family formed a permanent, private bond with the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. But unlike the thousands of swooning, screaming prepubescent debs-to-be in attendance at that 1956 matinee, the impish blonde with the iron resolve didn’t simply long to marry the King—she wanted to be him.

That was a popular daydream in those heady early days of rock if you were male, that is. Young ladies of Chapman’s breeding, however, were expected to matriculate in the finest finishing schools, there to master the homemaker’s arts and become wives, mothers and members of the Junior League.

Chapman recalls the moment she firmly pointed her red cowboy boots down the road less traveled.

"One of the most important decisions I ever made was telling everybody I was going to Vanderbilt University because it was in Nashville, and this is where I live now," she says by phone from Music City. "My parents didn’t want me to go there; they wanted me to go to a Virginia school like Hollins or Sweet Briar or Agnes Scott in Atlanta, and they took me to all of those schools." Parents James and Martha Chapman naturally feared their second of four children would fall in with the wrong element in Nashville artists, musicians, free thinkers and such.

Chapman, for one, was counting on it.

Three decades later, with eight albums, a few broken hearts and a stage career that flirted with fame behind her, Chapman recounts her wilder days in Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, a fond if fragmented look back at the more-or-less ongoing party that was the 1970s. Using a dozen of her songs as entry points, the rocker reveals the funky, drug-laced craziness behind the music. A succession of "speed freak boyfriends" contributed to the emotional wear-and-tear that eventually led her to check herself into an Arizona treatment center in 1988, at age 39. She retired from the road for good five years ago.

But it was one wild ride while it lasted.

When Chapman left Vandy and strapped on her electric guitar, she was an imposing figure: she topped six feet in her cowboy boots, unleashed an untamed mane of blond curls and belted out "grrrl rock" long before Patti Smith or Chrissie Hynde.

Nashville songwriters such as Waylon Jennings, Bob McDill and Harlan Howard frequently sat in on her sets at the Jolly Ox, where Chapman defied convention by ignoring the Top 40 in favor of headier tunes by Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and John Prine. When Jennings and Nelson hit it big with college audiences, Chapman found herself swept up in the Outlaw movement.

"I was like the kid sister," she chuckles. "When I describe myself as Gidget goes to Nashville, it was really true. I was like, Oh wow, these guys actually think about their lives and write songs about it!’ I wasn’t writing songs when I first met them." Nashville at the dawn of the ’70s provided ample material for budding songwriters; the challenge was remembering it the next day. Chapman wrote her first significant song, "Rode Hard and Put Up Wet," one summer morning in 1973 after awakening facedown in her front-yard vegetable patch clad only in her underpants, following a boozy night watching John Prine at a well-known Nashville nightspot, the Exit/In.

If female rock and rollers were scarce in those days, female songwriters were unheard of.

"It was almost like a clubhouse with a big sign on the door that says No Girls Allowed," she recalls. "I ran with these guys I would swarm’ with them as Waylon used to put it and I was accepted and would sit around with them at the guitar pulls, but nobody would give me a publishing deal." Undeterred, Chapman started her own publishing company, Enoree Music, named after the river that flowed through her family’s textile plant.

Chapman’s solo albums met with critical praise but dismal sales. No one, it seems, could quite categorize this Amazonian blues-rock-guitar-slinging-Farrah-Fawcett-bad-girl-songwriter.

There was another way to make it in Nashville, of course. "There were women who had boyfriend producers. I was just adamant about never having a boyfriend be my producer, and now looking back upon it, I think I might have hit the big time if I had gone along with that. But I didn’t want to lose control of my music." Chapman finally crashed the boy’s club in 1984 when newcomers Sawyer Brown recorded one of her songs.

"When my first hit, Betty’s Bein’ Bad,’ was in the list for CMA Song of the Year, out of 120 songs, two were written by women Betty’s Being Bad’ and Rosanne Cash’s Hold On.’ When you see that ballot today, it’s about half and half. That is an amazing change." Chapman is a familiar figure to fans of chief Parrothead Jimmy Buffett; she has played in his Coral Reefer Band, toured as his opening act and even holed up on a sailboat in Key West writing "The Perfect Partner" for his Last Mango in Paris album. "I love Buffett. He’s one-third musician, one-third Huey Long and one-third P.T. Barnum," she says.

Chapman credits novelists Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle, with whom she co-wrote the musical revue Good Ol’ Girls, for encouraging her to write her unorthodox memoir. "The word autobiography makes me cringe, just the presumptuousness of it: I was born a poor sharecropper’s child,’ whatever," she says.

Had she become a major star, it’s doubtful her memoir would have been half as revealing. Chapman figures the odds are good she wouldn’t even have lived to write it.

"Rosanne [Cash] has a T-shirt that says, Fame Kills.’ I think I’d probably be dead if everything that I wanted to happen at the time had happened back in the late ’70s because I didn’t know how to take care of myself out there. I was way too open. Fame would have eaten me alive."

Jay MacDonald, a writer in Oxford, Mississippi, has been on the bus with Willie Nelson but insists he didn’t exhale.

On October 15, 2002, Sam Waksal, disgraced founder of ImClone, pal of Martha Stewart and the poster boy of corporate fraud, pleaded guilty to six federal charges. Sitting in the back of the New York courtroom, wondering why he had come, was Waksal’s onetime friend and admirer David Denby, movie critic for The New Yorker. In the end, Denby decided to step from the crowd and shake the hand of the man he calls "an American fool for the ages."

Denby’s handshake is the near-final act in a three-year drama that began when Denby’s wife, novelist Cathleen Schine, asked for a divorce and he set out to make a million dollars in the high-tech stock boom. Denby’s stated goal was to gain enough money to hold onto the New York apartment where the couple had raised their two sons. But as Denby makes abundantly clear in American Sucker, his month-by-month account of this period, he was also seized by the stock market mania that gripped much of the nation at that time. "When Cathy left, I became irrationally exuberant so as not to be dead," he writes, deftly borrowing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s memorable cautionary phrase.

Denby is essentially a moralist, and his tone is often a sadder-but-wiser one. He argues with himself about the nature of greed, about values and materialism, about the new economy and what it might mean. He quotes St. Augustine and Thorstein Veblen as easily as Internet analyst Henry Blodgett (an acquaintance he cultivates), former SEC chair Arthur Levitt or the financial press. In between, he has a little to say about fatherhood, the life of a movie critic and, yes, even sex. There are moments when Denby overplays his narrative hand, but these are the forgivable lapses of a good and perceptive writer. Denby writes that his is a "commonplace American journey." To which I must respectfully say . . . balderdash. I mean, when was the last time you lost $900,000 in the stock market? No, we read American Sucker because it is a brighter, more dramatic story than our own. And we weep, probably with relief, perhaps with glee.