"This wasn’t what I meant to write at all," Bobbie Ann Mason says of her new memoir, Clear Springs. She laughs. "But that’s often true of a work. Usually I don’t know where I’m going at all. I’m just following something."

What Mason followed this time was an urge to recreate her own upbringing and the history of her family, especially her relationship with her mother over several decades. In five sections ranging back and forth from the 1940s into the 1990s, Clear Springs beautifully paints a loving and perceptive portrait of a family’s personalities and fortunes. "I think the questions I was asking are universal questions," Mason says. "The book starts out with the chapter at the pond, and reflecting on a moment of self-awareness, looking at where I’ve been and what I’ve connected to. It’s a way of asking who you are."

About five years ago Mason wrote what is now chapter one as a separate essay. "I didn’t realize I had a book for another year or so. In this case I did have a few years’ worth of interest in family history that got me going. There were all those early chapters about childhood and school and church. I kind of put them in different piles and tried to see what kind of sense I could make out of them. I had to find a way of sorting them all out so that they would cohere so that there would be patterns of them."

Clear Springs is Mason’s first book of autobiographical nonfiction, but it seems an inevitable step. Most of her fiction deals with the area she knows best, rural and suburban Kentucky, where she now lives again after decades in the North. Mason found the experience of writing a memoir fascinating. "I think it’s a natural impulse to want to find some kind of coherence and meaning in your life, to find that it has a narrative, and that there are patterns. There are themes in your life, and themes that connect back to previous generations. You can see where you fit into the puzzle." The image of fitting together puzzle pieces occurs repeatedly in Clear Springs. "Your life starts to make sense, in terms of what you’ve done before and what you’re doing now."

The prose in the new book is slower, more leisurely and meditative, than that of Mason’s fiction. "The characters I write about usually are in the middle of the whirlpool," Mason admits. "They’re racing down the highway. The confusion that the characters in the stories are in — it’s a culture shock. It’s rural people meeting the modern age and getting thrown out."

 One parallel between the fiction and the nonfiction is that Mason thinks of all the real people in Clear Springs as characters. "I think right at the heart of the book, for all the characters," she speculates, "is culture shock. It all happens at World War Two and thereafter. Before that, everything was pretty much the same. For all three generations that I’m writing about, the culture shock is happening almost simultaneously."

Mason has been chronicling this kind of shock for some time. Since her 1982 debut story collection, Shiloh and Other Stories, she has gone on to three novels — In Country, Spence + Lila, and Feather Crowns — and the excellent recent collection Midnight Madness. She is also writing the volume on Elvis Presley for the new Penguin Lives series of short biographies. One of the many pleasures in Clear Springs is Mason’s inclusion of snippets of the first stories she wrote, youthful imitations of the girls’ detective stories she so loved, which later resulted in her charming (and recently reissued) book The Girl Sleuths.

Considering her scholarly interests, evident in her book on Nabokov’s nature imagery, Mason’s style is surprisingly straightforward, never tricksy, seldom particularly allusive. But like Nabokov in his own autobiography, she approaches facts with the tools of an artist: "It’s awfully hard working with facts — or even what you remember as facts. I had so much trouble writing this book because I had to be faithful to what I knew to be fact, and yet I was trying to write something that in many ways was like fiction. But I couldn’t just haul off and make up things."

Like most memoirs, Clear Springs returns again and again to the question of the accuracy and potency of memories. "I realized that your memories over time are really lost, or they’re transformed," Mason says. "They become memories of memories, and you lose sight of the original. And finally there are a lot of things you remember that you can’t prove really happened, and there are a lot of things you don’t remember that did happen."

Out of her memories Mason brings to life the finely graded social distinctions which would be invisible to outsiders, but which anchor and define the members of a group, like the hierarchies in the world of Proust or Tolstoy. For example, Mason’s father treated her mother like a country girl, and his family made her feel inferior because she married slightly above her station.

To the question of what’s next for Bobbie Ann Mason, she gives some thought and responds slowly. "I think I want to turn a corner and go in a different direction. I don’t know what that will be. Well, I want to write short stories. I don’t know what they’ll be like, but I think they’ll be different."

Clear Springs ends in October of 1996, with a masterful chapter in which Mason herself does not appear. With all of her novelist’s talents she recreates an event her mother described to her, in which the elderly woman falls into a pond while trying to catch a fish. It’s a simple scene, barely an anecdote, that Mason somehow leaves resonating with significance and passion — and, quietly, implicitly, with her profound love for her mother.

There’s a fine moment in Clear Springs when Mason and her young husband begin their first garden. It nicely sums up her tone and symbolism in this book: "When I plunged my hands into the black New England soil, I felt I was touching a rich nourishment that I hadn’t had since I was a small child. It had been years since I helped Mama in the garden. Yet the feel of dirt seemed so familiar. This was real. It was true. I wheeled around and faced home."

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Playwright Neil Simon's first autobiographical work, Rewrites [1996], ended with the death of his first wife Joan after 20 years of marriage. Simon recently talked to BookPage about his latest book, The Play Goes On, which continues to the present.

BookPage: Why split your life into two volumes?

Neil Simon: I really couldn't go on past Joan's death because I didn't want to trivialize it. And The Play Goes On has turned out to be a fuller, richer book on its own. Also, the first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose. This time I knew more about the editing process, how it all works. It was easier.

BP: Easier technically or emotionally?

NS: Both. Once you've opened yourself up, it's best to go all the way. The first book was a love story about falling in love with the theater and with Joan. The second goes quite a few steps farther in talking about the price you pay for writing all those plays, for putting yourself on the line all the time before an audience.

BP: Were you surprised by which memories were the most painful, or the most pleasurable?

NS: It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were. The most pleasure came from remembering the start of a relationship that you thought would last forever or the starting of a play, and caring for that play about as much as you care for a newborn baby in the family. Then there's the disappointment when the play or the marriage doesn't work.

BP: It seems that Joan, your second wife Marsha Mason, and other family members often inspire your plays.

NS: I've just finished my 31st play, and actually only five have been based on my marriages, like Barefoot in the Park with Joan, and maybe five on my family. The rest have come out of my mind, my own creation.

BP: Tolstoy said a writer meets all of his characters before he's 12 years old.

NS: If I'm allowed to disagree with Tolstoy . . .

BP: He just stepped out.

NS: Fine. I'll ignore him. A lot of your personality is formed before you're 12, obviously, but only a few of my plays, like Broadway Bound and Brighton Beach Memoirs, use characters from my childhood. The more mature plays are affected only by my adult experiences.

BP: What do you mean in The Play Goes On by saying you've waited all your life to write Lost in Yonkers?

NS: It is probably the most honest play I've ever written. I did the best and dug the deepest I ever did. I was making up the story, but I tried to capture the characters as I do in my semi-autobiographical plays. I spared nobody in that play.

BP: You seem to be writing all the time.

NS: I work a regular five days a week like anybody else and take vacations. I work consistently, no matter what. I admit, when I took a four-week vacation to Europe with my family this year I got up every morning at 6:00 to work on fixing The Dinner Party, a new play set to open in Los Angeles in December. I won't give away the story, but it deals with six characters at a posh dinner. It's a dissection of their marriages and divorces.

BP: Relationships are your basic theme. And your characters, who are often very specifically from New York backgrounds, play well on stages in many different countries.

NS: The Odd Couple has the universal theme of the difficulty of two people living together. Others also do well, in Europe especially, but what surprised me is that The Sunshine Boys—and I'm only going by the royalty checks—plays everywhere in the world. I thought those two aging comedians were specifically New York.

BP: Your plays often translate well from stage to movies and TV, too.

NS: Not always, and I never write a play with an eye to film. And I don't like losing the words, as you have to, when I'm asked to turn a play into a movie. It's not a matter of ego . . . I'm just better able to create the character for an audience through words rather than through actions. I much prefer writing an original movie with the screen in mind to transferring a play to the screen.

BP: You mention Chekhov as an influence.

NS: I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.

BP: You tell many backstage stories in The Play Goes On, but you really don't talk about individual performances.

NS: I don't want to restrict the life of a play to a particular production. The original actors might leave after the first six months, and I want the play to last 30 or 40 years. You write for the character, not the actor on the stage, unlike films, where they might ask you to write a part to fit Mel Gibson or Julia Roberts even if the producer hasn't hired them! You never do that in a play.

BP: Is the germ of a new play for you a character, or the story, or the theme?

NS: All at once. I start with the characters but try to find almost simultaneously what situation they're in, what links them together. After about 25 or 30 pages, you think there's not enough stationery in the world to put down the whole story. That's the best feeling possible . . . It's still a mystery to me, how the plays come page by page, where they come from. Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

BP: "Pen in hand"?

NS: You get attached to the way you write, and I'm attached to notebooks. That's where I really write the plays. Just two or three pages at a time, then I transfer to the typewriter and rewrite while I type . . . That's the first rewrite! I don't use computers . . . I'm someone who needs to see the page right away in my hand.

BP: Does the writing get harder?

NS: Getting plays produced is harder, but I think if you have a truly good play it's not going to disappear, even with the tougher economics of Broadway and the competition of musicals and hits from Britain.

BP: The marriage and divorce themes of the play you're revising, The Dinner Party, dovetail with the conclusion of The Play Goes On, after your third divorce.

NS: I'm a marrying man. I've never left a marriage. If Joan hadn't died, we'd still be married today. But just as human beings can be born with genetic faults, I think some marriages have a genetic flaw that can cause them to die.

BP: At age 70 you still believe in marriage, in general and for yourself?

NS: I don't like dating or just living with a woman. I like to create a relationship, a marriage. And almost all of my marriages have involved children, so I'm really a family man as well. I'm going with someone now . . . She, I hope, will be the last marriage.

BP: A new play. A new marriage. The play goes on.

NS: Yes.

Charles Flowers, a freelance writer in Purdys, New York, recently received the Stephen Crane Literary Award.

It's a relief, really. Mary Gordon seems no more inclined to answer deeply personal questions than I am to ask them.

Of course, the questions flutter at the periphery of our conversation about her collection of meditative, autobiographical essays, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. How can I not wonder about the pain of a child who dreams of fairy princesses and kisses the knee of "Grandpa" Haubrecht in hopes of forming some sentimental connection with the old man, only to recognize in his unbending silence that she is not the magical child of her imagination, and probably not even a child at all? Or the desperation of a 15-year-old living alone with her alcoholic mother in increasing dishevelment, who hears a bird trapped in her closet struggling toward death and reacts by pulling her clothes from the closet, laying them on a chair, and never opening the closet again until it is time to go to college?

But, really, what more could I actually learn by asking Gordon about her implacable grandmother or her cruel aunt? Her mother and the priests who "embodied her idea of the desirable male"? Or the fact that her father, who died when she was seven, was the only person she liked to play with?

In these eight linked essays about the places that have shaped her sensibility—as in her recent memoir about her father, The Shadow Man, and her novels Final Payments and The Company of Women—Gordon writes with such brilliant specificity and with such sensitivity to the fine gradations of human emotion that readers simply infer the answers to such questions. To actually ask them is a betrayal of one of the deepest pleasures of reading writers as good as Gordon: that sense of one mind and spirit connecting with another's. To ask also invites a kind of reductive pop psychologizing. Or worse, the commodification of spirit, which is a sorry hallmark of our era, and an increasing concern for Gordon.

"What makes me nervous," she says midway through our conversation, "is that even people's interest in religion has become a commodity. I mean, the corporate world is now getting spiritual advisors so that their executives can be more productive, because they need to be in touch with their spiritual roots in order that they can make a better Web page . . . There's no other narrative, except commodity and profit. I find myself wondering, is there anything that is not commodifiable?"

Religion has never been a commodity for Gordon. She was raised in a family that "took deep pleasure in the liturgical world of the church" and assembled at her grandmother's on Tuesday nights to watch Bishop Sheen on television. But in the 1960s, in a moment described in the essay "The Architecture of a Life with Priests," a young priest's well-meaning remark "demolished the walls of the confessional," and led her to realize that she "would have to leave the church, because to live with this new sense of lightness and clarity I would need a dwelling that let in the light."

Thirty-some years later, Gordon has returned to the church. "Those sacred spaces were very formative, and irreplaceable," she says. "I began to understand that the habit of mind that was generated by those sacred spaces was very important to who I am, and that if I didn't honor my hunger for that, I would be less than truthful about who I really am. This is another reason why the metaphor of place is so important to me. I needed to be in the psychic space that only church ritual and the ethical framework that is expressed in ritual could give me. Nothing else would substitute for that."

But sacred spaces are not the only places Gordon reflects on in Seeing Through Places. There are also the houses of her grandmother and her babysitter and the neighbors next door, the public places of New York, and a forsaken house on the Cape. Seeing Through Places developed "without an intentional arc," Gordon says. At some point she realized that the essays she was writing were about place and that she wanted to "talk about where I am, I mean literally where I am and metaphorically where I am. So I organized the book around the motif of a journey." That journey spans only a short distance in miles—from Valley Stream, Long Island to Manhattan—but it is an immense psychic journey from a seemingly cloistered life in a working class neighborhood to public life as a best-selling novelist and English professor at Barnard.

"I really wanted to meditate on a place being at the center of a consciousness," Gordon says. "The accidents of place, the pressure of place that enables certain kinds of behaviors and makes other behaviors impossible. So that place becomes an agent in ways that are practical, in ways that can be tyrannical, and in ways that are very atmospheric and hard to pin down. . . . Often when people write about place it's from a sensibility that believes that place is divorced from people and has a kind of life of its own. I was brought up to think that people were more important than place and more important than things. I was even brought up in a sensibility that said that the invisible is more important than the visible. So the way that I come at place is not the way that Protestant males come at place. If this were an equation, I would be talking about place minus Thoreau."

In the most poignant essay in the book, "Places to Play," Gordon writes that as a child, she was not good at playing and always felt that she "was only masquerading as a child." Desperate to be taken seriously, she couldn't wait for childhood to end. Gordon later writes that she graduated from college younger than when she entered, and credits Barnard and the 1960s for teaching her the value of play.

"Far from being a '60s basher," she says, "I am so grateful for them. Because we were all allowed to play and to be serious. . . . The playful and the serious were able to flow in and out of one another in a way that for me was extremely freeing. And at Barnard, my mind was given play. I was given tremendous attention, a debt I can never repay."

Little wonder, then, that she has returned to Barnard to teach and that she writes of the place in her final essay with such affection. "I'm always afraid that with one false move, which I can't predict or name, I could be back at that old place I was in when I was young," Gordon says near the end of our conversation. "But I also feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and amazement that life has had so much more pleasure and amplitude and graciousness than I ever believed it would have when I was a child."

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

Anyone who’s observed Jimmy Buffett’s music career and heard his song lyrics knows that his main product is carefree optimism. But Jimmy has a little secret: he’s been a workaholic for 30 years. As we learn in his memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, he works just as hard at having good times as he does earning them.

The book is a travelogue with flashbacks — and not the kind you might fear. Insightful and entertaining, this detailed instruction on how to live a rewarding life might well be deemed the ultimate self-help manual.

We spoke to Mr. Buffett recently, just after he’d spent several days in New Orleans, "revisiting his youth."

Tom Corcoran: In A Pirate Looks at Fifty you say that you squeeze 36 hours into every day. How did you find time to create a 400-page book?
Jimmy Buffett: I had a deadline! I’d started a novel before I got involved in the musical production of Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival. That was fun, but a creative sidetrack. I still owed the publisher a book. I pulled out my old journals and took a lesson from David Niven, who wrote a wonderful non-tell-all biography called The Moon Is a Balloon. It was informative, yet entertaining to the point of near-fiction in which he’d made himself a character. I decided to write about a journey during which I reflected on events in my life. A lot of it was already on paper. Plus, that deadline . . .

TC: How much of your wanderlust can we attribute to your reading?
JB: Almost all of it, from my youth up till today. I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television. My mother insisted that her children read. To describe my scarce leisure time in today’s terms, I always default to reading. It didn’t hurt that I came from a Gulf Coast storytelling tradition. I went to the Caribbean because my grandfather sang calypso songs. Simple as that.

TC: You state in this book that you’ve tried to follow your instincts and keep your sense of humor. Creativity aside, how much of your success can you attribute to instinct and humor?
JB: Ninety percent of it. Instinct taught me 20 years ago to pace a song or a concert performance. That translates into pacing a story, pleasing a reading audience. I don’t know where I got it. It must be instinct. Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

TC: A Pirate Looks at Fifty demonstrates your fascination with many people, not necessarily for what they do, but how well they do it. Do you judge yourself the same way?
JB: I remember the excruciating school task of writing a three-page term paper. But, oh, that feeling when I was done! I think I drive myself for that feeling of accomplishment. Herman Wouk told me, "Write a page a day. It will add up." So I make sure to do it. Whether it’s a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it’s writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.

TC: Twenty years ago you were sailing the Caribbean. For the past decade you’ve been flying all kinds of aircraft, all over the hemisphere. How do you foresee your introduction to "A Pirate Looks at Sixty"?
JB: I’m inspired by people who keep on rolling, no matter their age. I’ve talked recently with Harry Belafonte and with Mose Allison, two musicians who continue to enjoy performing and life. Quitting doesn’t enter my mind. I want to keep going as I have, to travel, read, perform, write, and enjoy my family. I’ve promised myself only this: no more Laundromats, no more two-shows-a-night, and no more deadlines. I’ll work at my own pace.

Five or six years ago, Da Chen got badly bitten by the writing bug. He had finished Columbia Law School and moved on to the Wall Street firm of Rothschild, Inc. Then he started reading John Grisham and, like any number of other dreamy, ambitious young law students, he thought he would try his hand at writing a legal thriller. "I got 200 pages into it and realized I didn't have a Bruce Willis character," Da Chen says with a rueful laugh. He gave it up.

The problem was, the writing bug wouldn't let go. Perhaps Da Chen moped a bit. Perhaps he stared a little too longingly at the blank yellow legal pads he hoped to fill with character and action. At some point his wife, a physician, suggested that he write about his childhood.

Da Chen grew up in the tiny Chinese village of Yellow Stone in the 1960s and 1970s, during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. He sometimes told his American-born wife wild tales from his childhood—about dogs eating snakes, and men eating dogs. "It was humorous to make her feel disgusted," Da Chen recalls. "She was fascinated—and sort of disturbed—by the stories I told. My childhood was so very different from hers. She met me after I graduated from law school. I came to her as a suit, nothing else, and a suit hides a person. The present is always a disguise for the past." There were stories he had not told his wife, stories he could barely tell himself.

His wife continued to urge him to write about his childhood, if not for the readers of the world, then at least for his own children. He tried, but it was difficult to know where to begin. His great grandfather had passed a very difficult civil service test and eventually became the regional governor and a large landholder. Should he begin with him? Or with his grandfather, who quartered Red Army troops during the Communist Revolution, thereby escaping the fate of his wife's wealthy brothers, who were all executed? Or with his father, a disgraced landlord, who was hauled into labor camps with each shift of the political winds in faraway Beijing? Or with his remarkable grandmother? Or his equally remarkable mother?

"Least of all with me, right?" Da Chen says. "A first person story is very rare in Chinese literature. China is such a country of tradition, it is very hard to put yourself at the center. I struggled with that a lot at the beginning."

Eventually he found a path and a structure, and the pages of the book that would become Colors of the Mountain began to pour out of him. Then something happened. He came to describe a moment in the third grade when his teacher, one of the ignorant, vicious, petty tyrants set loose upon the land by the Cultural Revolution, stripped him of his identity, began calling him "the guy in the corner," and made Da Chen, son of a landlord, open game for every sort of cruelty.

"I would lock myself in our little spare bedroom," Da Chen recalls, "and I would write and I would cry. I can't believe how much anger I had. I buried this huge depression and sadness until the moment I began to write the book. I rarely told people about this experience because I always felt that I must have done something wrong to cause it. Now, after writing Colors of the Mountain, I feel, wow, it was not me. The whole society was dysfunctional at the time."

It is almost impossible for the Western reader to understand just how dysfunctional Chinese society was. We tend to see the Cultural Revolution as a distant abstraction, in broad political and sociological terms. In Colors of the Mountain, Da Chen presents the impact of the Cultural Revolution on a small village, far from China's political epicenter, as seen through the eyes of an exceptionally bright, sensitive, and artistic boy.

"I didn't want to go into too much detail about the political background," Chen says. "I just want people to imagine and to understand that this is what happened to me. The book is more from the heart than the mind. I was only nine years old. I didn't know what made sense and what didn't make sense. All I knew was what I had to go through."

Naturally not everything he went through was a hardship. Chen describes warm friendships with a rough bunch of boys he fell in with when the other children in the village rejected and tormented him. He describes the sanctuary of love and warmth he found at home with his parents and siblings. He describes a beautiful, "sparsely populated, very pastoral" region where "you could go and write great poems—if you weren't forced to plow the fields." He also vividly describes the extraordinary change that came over the country when Mao died in 1976.

"It was a very strange feeling," Chen says. "Here was this guy I was supposed to hate forever, which I do. But Mao was the heaven; Mao was the earth—and everything in between. That's how big he was. When he died it was like a whole dynasty had died, and I felt that China might die with him."

But instead of dying, China was swept by a passion for education. Even the remote village of Yellow Stone was carried along by college fever. Caught up in the national mood and shouldering the aspirations of his family, Da Chen proved to be a disciplined and brilliant student, scoring so high on his exams that he was admitted to the prestigious Beijing Language Institute. Colors of the Mountains ends with Da Chen boarding a train, the first train he had ever ridden, for the 50-hour trip to Beijing.

"In the United States, people everywhere go to college. It's expected. But for me, nothing in my life can ever compare to the moment I left Yellow Stone to go to college. It was like being liberated from a dungeon. For much of my life I felt like a frog trapped at the bottom of the well, looking up at beautiful passing swans. A quick glimpse and they were gone. Suddenly I felt that the swans I so admired had dropped into my well."

Da Chen thinks that even though Colors of the Mountain is set in China and is about a Chinese boy, "it is really about every boy and every girl. Everybody has gone through something like this." I doubt that his American readers will agree. Colors of the Mountain is about an extraordinary journey that, thankfully, most of us will never need to endure.

But Da Chen is exactly right when he says Colors of the Mountain "is about hopes and dreams. It's about hope even when you are hopeless. It's about making dreams come true."

Alden Mudge works for the California Council for the Humanities in San Francisco.

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.