For more than a year, journalist Norah Vincent experienced life in a man’s loafers. To make sure she would “pass” as a fellow she named Ned, she cut her hair in a flattop, applied stubble to simulate a five o’clock shadow, squeezed into an extra-small sports bra to conceal her breasts, wore a male appendage she nicknamed “Sloppy Joe” inside a jock strap, and studied with a Julliard tutor to acquire a man’s voice and phrasing. With the help of horn-rimmed glasses and Ivy League attire, she indeed became a Self-Made Man, the title of her new book describing a journey into manhood and back that nearly became a descent into madness.

Through five states in three regions of the country (all unnamed), Ned Vincent embedded himself in the male landscape: he made buddies, joined a men’s bowling team, went to strip clubs, dated women, joined a monastery, attended a male therapy group and even experienced the brutal realities of a high-pressure sales job.

Contrary to what many might expect, Vincent found that a man’s lot is no easier—and is in many ways more emotionally draining—than that of a woman.

“I suspect people will go into this thinking oh, it’s written by a lesbian, she’s going to be male-bashing all the way down the line,” Vincent says by phone from Manhattan. “But my experience was one that made me feel very vulnerable and made me feel a lot of pain and difficulty. While all of us in the post-feminist movement are convinced that women have always had it worse and men have always had it better, it took me stepping into their shoes to realize that that’s not true at all.”

Vincent had grown progressively weary of writing op-ed pieces for the Los Angeles Times, where she’d become known, and routinely pummeled, as “the libertarian lesbian.” When a friend convinced her to dress in drag for an evening in the East Village, she took the dare and stumbled onto an adventure in immersion journalism that proved irresistible.

“You find yourself suddenly in a situation where all the social rules are different,” Vincent says by phone from Manhattan. “I likened it to suddenly hearing sounds that only dogs can hear.” Case in point: when Norah would walk through her neighborhood, the guys hanging outside the bodegas would ogle her; when Ned walked by, they would completely ignore him.

“It was really astounding the difference when I walked by those same places as a man and nobody would look me in the eye; it was a concerted looking-away. Even if you were a good-looking guy, women would check you out in a very surreptitious way that isn’t confrontational. There was a relief in that invisibility,” she says.

Rather than organize her observations chronologically or geographically, Vincent sorts her chapters by topic: Friendship, Love, Sex, Work, etc. In “Friendship,” Ned bowls weekly (and weakly) with three blue-collar Joes who accept him despite his peculiarities (he doesn’t smoke or drink). In “Sex,” Ned endures the mechanical loneliness of a strip club. In “Love,” he dates women for whom Ned is more Mr. Close than Mr. Right.

The rejection that Ned experiences in the dating scene had a powerful impact on Norah. “It’s awful. I think most women don’t have any idea how much guts it takes, how much emotional energy and confidence it takes to approach a woman,” she says. “Men need ego because they don’t get to show weakness and they don’t get to show need, they have to compensate for it by a sense of, I can do this, I’m entitled, because that’s all they have.”

While guys may appear brutish, undemonstrative and unfeeling on the surface, Vincent found that inside they’re as victimized as women by their gender socialization, the “straitjacket of the male role.” What’s more, although it won’t please many feminists, Vincent concludes that women, not men, actually call the shots, at least where hooking up is concerned.

“When you see it from a guy’s point of view, you really realize that, if nothing else, at the most basic sexual level, women can really take it or leave it most of the time,” she says. “Just that aspect alone already gives us a leg up because we get to choose; we get to say, I’ll take you but I won’t take you. That’s a lot of power.”

Unlike John Howard Griffin, who dyed his skin to pass as an African American in Black Like Me, Vincent never felt in physical danger while disguised as Ned. Even when she revealed her true identity, as she ultimately did with many of the men she met as Ned, most were comfortable continuing their friendship.

But the daily commute between man and woman eventually took its psychological toll on Vincent, and it took her months to recover from the ordeal.

“That was hard. I had learned to present myself in a more male way mentally—not just in how I looked—and I needed to step away from that, to slowly undo that. I had to reclaim myself.”

Vincent admits she didn’t particularly care for Ned: “I wish I’d been a cooler guy, which maybe was a great thing because it was a typical male experience. I felt a little bit geeky and inadequate. I wish I’d been more of a stud.”

That said, did she hold on to any part of Ned’s character?

“Yeah. I don’t know if you can print this, but I certainly held on to a piece of his balls (laughs). As Hamlet would say, probably the strongest remaining male advantage is ‘thinking makes it so.’ It’s that feeling that, when I’m feeling afraid of something I have to do or I’m feeling unequal to it, I say to myself, just do it. Don’t think about it, just get up and do it. There is a way in which that is a gift that men have that compensates for all the things they don’t have.”

Jay MacDonald writes professionally from Oxford, Mississippi.

There have been few sign-offs in television history more famous, or more frequently parodied, than the emphatic, "This is Julia Child: bon appetit!" And it was thoroughly characteristic straightforward, enthusiastic, convincing and delivered with the gusto that pervaded her life. It was that frank If I can do it, you can do it approach, says her great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, that so swiftly made Julia a friend, confidant and coach to millions of amateur cooks.

But what her viewers and readers also recognized was her very real passion for food, particularly French, of course, but also for any honest, fresh, imaginative and generous approach to cooking. In fact, Julia Child was a great romantic, and her new memoir, completed with Prud'homme's help after her death, is first and foremost a love story.

"This is a book about some of the things I have loved most in life," she writes in the introduction to My Life in France. "My husband, Paul Child; la belle France; and the many pleasures of cooking and eating." And it is impossible not to feel Julia's excitement at her progressive discoveries of French cuisine, culture, cookware, cooking and ultimately teaching throughout this lively reconstruction of the Childs' first posting to Paris, from 1948-1954, and later in their second home in Provence.

It's also clear how much she adored her husband, a self-taught gourmet and bon vivant, a painter and photographer despite having lost one eye as a boy and her greatest fan. Both the dedication, "To Paul Child," and the cover make this clear. The jacket photograph shows P & J, as they sometimes signed themselves, with red paper hearts pinned to their shirts. It was their habit to send out Valentine's Day cards instead of Christmas cards, Prud'homme says, and he includes photos of several in the book.

For Prud'homme, who had not known his great-uncle in his prime, getting to know Paul through his letters was part of the fun; "it was sort of like doing archaeological exploration of my own family. We were fairly close Paul and [my grandfather] Charlie were twins, and we were always together for Thanksgiving and so on but they seemed kind of exotic, always flying off to Paris or California or something." Fortunately, Paul Child was a great correspondent.

"He was such a vibrant person as a young man," says Prud'homme. "He sent letters to his brother every week, long, handwritten letters, funny, acerbic, very lively." Prud'homme, a successful freelance journalist, uses many of these old letters, as well as photographs and mementos ("she had them stuffed everywhere ") to set off his great-aunt's often irreverent reminiscences.

"She had always talked about writing a book like this, and every year I used to go and visit and offer to help. But she was very much of a life moves forward' person, and it would have made her lonely to pore over old letters. So I would just get her talking and take notes." The stories are frequently hilarious—post-World War II Paris was not always an easy place for a six-foot-two and rather gawky American naif—often with her sense of wonder and delight still tangible. It's especially vivid when discussing her determination to learn French techniques, and her unhappy sense that the great school Le Cordon Bleu was in decline, even as she subjected her husband and friends to endless batches of homemade mayonnaise.

That she and two of her friends, Simone Simca Beck Fischbacker and Louisette Bertholle, dared to call their fledgling school L'Ecole des Gourmettes was a sort of declaration of culinary independence. They were determined to teach not haute cuisine but honest cuisine bourgeoisie—an attitude that led to the publication of the landmark Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Prud'homme says, "She patterned her teaching technique on Chef Max Bugnard, her mentor at Cordon Bleu. He taught her not only how to cook like the French but how to shop like the French take your time, ask the vendors about their wares and they'll open up to you. He used to say, Goutez! Goutez! (Taste! Taste!)" There are fascinating cameos and sidelights throughout the book: the wild-haired grande dame of literature Colette at her favorite cafe; James Beard in a vast billowing Japanese kimono strolling across the fields to breakfast with the Childs; a series of eccentric maids, including one who flushed a beer can down the toilet, and so on. There's a cheery Calamity Julia tone to these adventures. It's somehow not at all surprising that just before she was to tape the first episode of "The French Chef," the studios at WGBH, the Boston public television station that produced the show, burned down.

"What you see in 'The French Chef' is what you got with Julia, maybe a little amp-ed up for television, but not much," says Prud'homme. " But what I didn't really get as a kid was what a great impact she had on so many people. And I also didn't realize how hard she worked at it. She had tremendous discipline, despite the funny stuff."

Julia Child died in her sleep on Aug. 13, 2004, two days short of her 92nd birthday. She was so indelible a part of American culture that the kitchen where much of " The French Chef" was filmed has been reconstructed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Her last words in the book refer to her first meal on French soil, in 1948. "In all the years since that succulent meal, I have yet to lose the feelings of wonder and excitement that it inspired in me. I can still almost taste it. And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite—toujours bon appetit!"

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post and the author of nine books, including The Ethnic Food Lover's Companion.

Ignore the title of Nando Parrado’s new book, Miracle in the Andes. Anyone familiar with this plane-crash survival story either from the original news accounts, Piers Paul Read’s best-selling 1974 book Alive or the movie that dramatized it knows that the experience illustrates the triumph of rationality, not the blessings of blind luck. The survivors simply outsmarted the elements that should have killed them all.

Here’s what happened: On Oct. 12, 1972, a rugby team set off from Montevideo, Uruguay, to fly to Santiago, Chile, for a game. There were 45 people on the plane, including the crew, Parrado (who was a member of the team), his mother and his sister. The next day the plane crashed high in the Andes. Twenty-nine people survived the crash, but only 16 were still alive 72 days later when rescuers finally arrived. Stranded without food, the survivors began eating their own dead. After a number of thwarted starts that led nowhere, Parrado and his friend, Roberto Canessa, finally were able to trudge across the high mountains and summon help an ordeal that took 10 days. Thus, an experience that might have turned into a real-life Lord of the Flies became instead The Magnificent Sixteen.

Parrado was an adviser for the 1993 film Alive! so it is no surprise that his book describes essentially the same incidents as the movie. Where the book departs is in its plumbing of the author’s mind as he comes to terms with his own severe injuries, the many deaths after the crash, the realization that no one is looking for the survivors and, always, the bone-chilling cold.

The precision with which Parrado remembers specific dates and details may strain one’s belief, and the generosity of spirit he attributes to virtually everyone seems more after-the-fact than contemporaneous with the event. Even so, the tenacity and cooperation of the youth most were between 19 and 21, Parrado was 23 were amply demonstrated by their survival. Parrado, now 56, is a prominent TV producer and motivational speaker. To clear up some questions the book raised, BookPage contacted him in Montevideo, where he still lives.

Are all 16 who were rescued still alive? Yes, they are all alive and very well indeed. Were any lawsuits filed as a result of the crash? No lawsuits were ever made against the Uruguayan Air Force [which owned the plane], the government or anybody else, [either] from the group or from an individual.

As an adviser to the movie Alive! were you satisfied with the way it turned out? Yes. It was quite a big effort and the best movie that could be made according to the budget. [Director] Frank Marshall really got involved in the movie, and everything in it is 100 percent true. Are you able to go for long periods without thinking about the crash? Yes, sometimes for weeks. When something hard or difficult comes to me, then I remember or when I look at my family. Then I’m really thankful that I am alive and able to enjoy them. What were some of the survival elements it took you too long to learn? How to fight the cold, how to use the snow as an ally and not as an enemy [and] that you should climb mountains through the ridges and not straight on. What was there about your father that drew your thoughts so strongly to him during the ordeal? We were very close, and I was always thinking how terrible he must be feeling having lost his family in one accident. Your account of the experience is very detailed and specific. Did you keep any sort of records while your were on the mountain? No. Some things are hard to forget! Did you feel the way you thought you would when you returned to the crash site? I returned to the site of the crash 11 times with my father to put flowers on the graves of my mother, sister and friends. It’s an amazing landscape when you are in the company of a great guide and a well-organized expedition. [There’s] maybe a sense of pride and accomplishment looking at those enormous mountains and having defeated them. [There’s] also some sadness but no grief or pain.

Adam Gopnik arrived in New York City from Montreal in 1980 "with a satchel full of ambitions." First among them was the dream of becoming a songwriter. A close second was the desire to write for The New Yorker. He pursued both while officially being in New York to do graduate work in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts.

The songwriting career, alas, remains an elusive brass ring for Gopnik. But after six years of sitting in a 9-by-11 basement apartment on East 87th Street that he shared with his then-girlfriend-now-wife, Martha, hammering out weekly pieces that he would submit to the Talk of the Town section, Gopnik "finally, finally" broke in at The New Yorker in 1986. He soon became one of the magazine’s pre-eminent essayists.

"For me what makes the essay such a miraculous form," Gopnik says during a call to his family’s newer, larger, non-basement Upper East side apartment, "is that it’s the only form where ideas and emotions walk hand-in-hand. The novel or short story can be a highly intellectual form, but . . . when a work of fiction turns toward argument, we feel it’s a distraction from the drama. Similarly if a straight review takes too sharp a turn into the personal narrative, it feels extraneous. But with the essay, that’s exactly what you’re trying to do – find a subject that simultaneously sets off a chain of thought and sets off an association of feeling. When an essay works successfully, it is because it manages to fire on both sets of neurons at once."

In 1995 Gopnik went with Martha and their son, Luke, to be the magazine’s correspondent in Paris. Upon his return to New York in 2000, he published Paris to the Moon, a series of linked essays interweaving previously published and recently written work, a collection that most definitely hit both sets of neurons and is, quite simply, one of the most insightful and amusing books about France available today. Now, six years later, Gopnik returns with Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York, a book quite different in subject and tonal shadings from Paris but which is likely to rival it in readers’ estimations.

"I wanted very much for the book to have a particular kind of arc," Gopnik says. "An arc of excitement at homecoming, then loss, and then recovery." The five years he writes about include the devastating September 11 terrorist attacks and the return of the cancer which would prove fatal to Gopnik’s close friend Kirk Varnedoe, art historian and curator of painting and art at the Museum of Modern Art. "I hope that the me in this book, the narrator, goes from being happy to sad to a little bit wiser," Gopnik says.

Gopnik’s subjects here range from a hilarious remembrance of his former therapist, to observations on the strange effects of feral parakeets in Flatbush and telecom switch hotels in Manhattan on the power grid, to what is almost a hymn for 9/11, to the diminishment of the New York department store, once "the cathedral of material aspiration." But the bulk of the essays are given over to very funny and profoundly moving meditations on family life, and particularly on the lives of his son Luke and daughter Olivia as they grow up in New York over these five years.

"As the book makes plain, I like family life," Gopnik says. " I like living amongst kids and I’ve never found that hubbub an impediment to working." In fact, Gopnik admits to "an excess of nervous energy and unless I’ve got some source of noise that can siphon off that nervous energy so that whatever intellectual energy I have can go to work, I get very restless." So while working on this book, he set up behind a screen outside the door of his daughter Olivia’s bedroom, where he was "sort of the forgotten man in the house, listening to the children chatting in the kitchen nearby."

Gopnik says the biggest surprise in returning to New York was to find "how well-suited to children it is. I think it’s probably always been reasonably well-suited but it seems particularly so now. And I’m aware, as I say in the book, that many people find that appalling because they feel the city has become suburban and no longer has the kind of louche creative energy that it did when we arrived a quarter century ago. There’s some truth in that. Like everything else in life, New York is a series of gains and losses and question marks, not simple exclamation points."

The public and private losses are almost overwhelming during this period in New York. But so are the adaptations to loss. Led by son Luke, for example, the family – including the skeptical author himself – responds to the 9/11 attacks by becoming loyal Yankee fans. And in a brilliant arrangement of essays that pairs a seriocomic piece about the death of Olivia’s fish Bluie ("Death of a Fish") and a marvelous paean to Kirk Varnedoe ("Last of the Metrozoids") Gopnik actually moves both himself and his readers toward wisdom.

"My friend Kirk Varnedoe is in some sense the hero of this book," Gopnik says. "By brutal coincidence he had a recurrence of cancer just before 9/11 and in effect knew he was dying from that Fall on. On the day that 9/11 happened, he said, here is something that we can experience either as an injury or as an imagery. If we experience it as an injury, we will experience it as tragedy and grief. And tragedy and grief are things we can recover from. But if we experience it as an imagery, it will simply run on a recurring loop and never end.

"I am as haunted by what happened as anybody else is, but mortality is the circumstance in which we live, whether it’s the horrible murderous mortality of 9/11 or the comic mortality of poor Bluie or the slow death of a dear friend. In each case we cannot help but mourn, and we cannot help but begin again. If there’s a life lesson in the book – and my children always accuse me of offering far too many life lessons – I hope that’s it."

Alden Mudge fled New York City in 1989 for the left coast, and arrived just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Be careful what you let your children read. That may be one of the unintended lessons in Ed Viesturs’ thoroughly absorbing memoir about his 17-year campaign to climb the world’s 14 highest mountains, No Shortcuts to the Top.

Growing up outside Chicago in the early 1970s, Viesturs happened to read Maurice Herzog’s story of his 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first 8,000-meter mountain ever climbed. After that, "I just felt that Illinois was not quite right for me," Viesturs says during a call to Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he lives with his wife, Paula, and their three young children.

In fact, nothing but the Himalaya would ultimately satisfy the questing urge inspired by that and other accounts of adventure Viesturs read as a youth. "For whatever reason, I like things that are difficult," he says, " things that are not only athletically challenging but that also make me really think about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. Plus it’s just so beautiful up there, and the higher you go, the more spectacular it gets. You realize you are only one of a few people to be in these amazing places."

Viesturs is one of just 12 humans ever to have climbed all the world’s peaks over 8,000 meters high – all of them in the Himalaya – and one of only six people to do so without supplemental oxygen. As a guide, Viesturs also climbed many of these mountains using extra oxygen, which afforded him the stamina to assist client climbers. He has summited Everest six times and, as he vividly describes in the book, was on that mountain in 1996 as logistical organizer, lead climber and on-camera talent for the IMAX movie expedition when disaster struck.

Two of Viesturs’ friends and longtime climbing companions – Rob Hall and Scott Fischer (who was the photographer at Ed and Paula’s wedding) – were among those who died in the fierce storm on the mountain that year, despite the heroic efforts of Viesturs, the IMAX team and others to save them. In No Shortcuts to the Top and in conversation, Viesturs is characteristically modest about his selflessness in giving up scarce resources and even scarcer time to rescue other climbers. "I’ve always felt that if other people need your help, that is the priority," Viesturs says. "If I knew that I got to the summit but another climber didn’t make it because I didn’t stop and help, that would bother me to the end of my days." Viesturs writes movingly about sitting with the frozen bodies of his friends after the storm had passed.

In a conversational tone that is remarkably similar to his relaxed, candid speaking style, Viesturs, with co-author David Roberts, writes about both the physical and financial challenges of being a mountaineer (he was fanatical about training, but in the early years struggled without sponsorship to finance his climbing expeditions while working first as a veterinarian and then – because it offered a more flexible schedule – as a carpenter); about the stress his career put on his family ("Hopefully it comes out that I’m sensitive to other people’s feelings, and Paula’s in particular"); about the details of daily life during a climb (which included long periods of waiting for good conditions, so that Viesturs would "read 20 books on an expedition . . . everything from the latest Tom Clancy to the classics to books by other mountaineers"); and about the personalities of the mountains he has climbed and the companions he has climbed with.

Fittingly, Annapurna was the final and most dangerous mountain Viesturs climbed in his quest. One of the most disciplined and safety-conscious climbers of all time, he had twice turned back from Annapurna’s summit before finally reaching the top on May 12, 2005. "I’ve always felt if I didn’t fail because of my lack of desire or training, I was fine with turning back. It was the mountain that was calling the shots," Viesturs says. "You can’t conquer a mountain. By having the right attitude, by being humble and respectful, I was allowed to go up. And I was allowed to go down. You have to follow your instincts and budget your resources and just keep plowing through it. And you have to remember that getting to the top doesn’t prove anything. It’s getting back that shows you have strength and intelligence. Otherwise it doesn’t mean a thing."

Alden Mudge has trekked to Everest base camp at 18,500 feet.

Life is ultimately about death, and nowhere is the reminder more poignant than in the brief and bittersweet relationship with a companion animal. Intense gratitude and joy mingled with sadness is a sort of concrete upon which adult life is built, writes Mark Doty, and this bedrock underlies the complex relationships with two special dogs captured in his memoir, Dog Years.

Good writing about animals is almost always about something else, says Doty, an award-winning poet and writer who has been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, the T.S. Eliot Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The dogs as they always are are a vehicle to think about other things. Those things include an intimate chunk of Doty's life nursing his partner Wally who was dying of AIDS; writing; teaching college students; fixing up their 200-year-old house in Provincetown on Cape Cod; and caring for their dog, a shaggy black Lab-Newfie mix named Arden, an animal utterly devoted to the sick man.

When Wally requests a little lap dog to comfort him (Arden has gained so much weight after being fed the bacon meant to tempt the patient that he can't jump on the bed), Doty comes back with shelter dog Beau, a skinny, rambunctious Saluki-golden retriever mix who brings a much-needed chaotic, bounding energy to their house.

If you set out to write a full-length memoir about your pets, you're asking for trouble, Doty admits with a laugh. Who's not going to roll their eyes? People lack distance from their pets, just like they do from their children or their dreams. I thought from the beginning that I was doing something unlikely with this book. Determined to make this compelling to the reader, even though it shouldn't be, Doty is careful with telling moments and scenes that flesh out the laconic and contemplative Arden and the young whirlwind Beau, companions on the trajectory of his life. Elegiac and funny chapters are trailed by brief, delicate entr'actes, with tiny observations, like the thump of an arthritic dog's tail, and huge gaping gashes in life, like the death of a loved one, given equal weight and clarity.

Animals' lack of language feels like an invitation to the writer, Doty says. I wanted to talk about the role they had played in my adventures, but I also wanted them to stand on their own four feet, as distinct characters. He catalogs their sweet routines (one involves Arden being stretched by the legs between the two men as he growls appreciatively), their winsome quirks (Beau's obsession with the minute crumbs and leftovers tossed from seafood shacks and Dumpsters along the sea) and their hair-raising escapades (Arden is hit by a car after chasing a rabbit from a hedge, but found a bit dazed the following day, thanks to their tight-knit community). They're animals, that's part of what makes their company so pleasurable, Doty notes. They're not human beings! We can know that about them, without forgetting that they also have real emotional lives, and that they are complicated beings that we get to know at least to some degree. Animal company invites us to language, Doty said, because there they are, brimming with feeling and clearly thinking, but not having any words at all. There's a part of me that's a little jealous of that. How wonderful to be immersed in experience and not caught up in the world of words. But the bright always has a shadow, and so come the inevitable leave-takings: first Wally, then Beau as a young dog from kidney disease, and then most heartbreakingly, the valiant Arden. Cloaked in nearly unthinkable abundance and unutterable sorrow, the book is a deadened twinkling landscape of the human heart, with snow-covered undulating dunes and twisting roads, but also shining bright spots: Doty falls in love again and gains another companion who shares his love of dogs, and the emotional landscape, always slanted downhill, remains buoyant and oddly hopeful.

Cute dog stories and cute dog pictures don't really satisfy me, Doty said. So often they don't quite get it right. They make it cute instead of true. Dog Years points out what is true and dignified and magical about life with animals; rather than seeking out the exotic or new, we want to see the ordinary more clearly, Doty said, and there is no better way than through our dogs.

Somehow, memory seems too slight a word, too evanescent, Doty writes about taking a walk after the death of Beau. This is almost a physical sensation, the sound of those paws, and it comes allied to the color and heat of him, the smell of warm fur, the kinetic life of being hardly ever still: what lives in me.

Her closest friends call her by her initials: A.M. She reminds a caller that her often hilarious and frequently unsettling novels – This Book Will Save Your Life (about an L.A. businessman in midlife crisis); The End of Alice (about the correspondence between a college coed and a pedophile murderer); and Jack (about a teenage boy whose father comes out of the closet) – are anything but autobiographical. And while she is funny, friendly, even chatty during a call to her home in Manhattan, A.M. Homes deftly deflects any and all questions about her personal life: "What can I tell you about my family life? I have one child, I live in New York City, I have a dog and, you know, a really busy life," she says with pleasant finality.

No wonder that Homes, who is something of celebrity in New York literary circles, has a reputation for being a very private person. No wonder, too, that she found writing her extraordinary memoir about meeting her birth parents 30 years after being put up for adoption "so incredibly, god-awful hard."

The Mistress’s Daughter opens in 1992 during a Christmas visit Homes made to her family in Washington, D.C. After dinner on her first night there, Homes’ parents sit her down and tell her that her birth mother wants to meet her. Homes had always known she was adopted. Even as a child she remembers feeling she was "kind of in service to other people in some way" because of this. "So I was often paying attention to other people’s moods and what they might be thinking and feeling. Part of that is who I am as a person anyway. But always being slightly on the outside and always watching a bit more than participating is in some way a combination of the experience of being adopted and of my own personality." It’s also an experience that helped define her as a writer, she says. "I tend to observe people’s emotional lives. I’m not that observant of the physical world in some ways, but I really do know how to read people."

Homes’ appraisal of her own conflicted emotions about her birth parents is both unsparingly honest and psychologically harrowing. Of course there is much to be conflicted about. Homes’ birth mother, who was 22 when Homes was born, never married or had another child and was a complicated, needy, unpleasant woman who died alone of kidney failure in 1998 after walking away from an operation that might have saved her life. Homes’ birth father was a much older, successful businessman with a family when he began his affair with a teenage girl working in his shop. He demanded that Homes take a DNA test and when the test proved she was his daughter, he promised to make her part of his family. He also said "Now that I’m your father, I think that I have the right to ask – are you dating anyone?"

The Mistress’s Daughter is A.M. Homes at her mordant best. "I don’t think I could have written this book without all the experience I’ve had as a writer of novels, of editing and trying to be concise," she says of her struggles to complete the book. "One of the hardest things about it was taking something that was so emotional and psychological and finding words for it. It’s an emotional experience that’s very primitive. It’s the basic experience of being separated from your parents."

Homes wrote the first section of The Mistress’s Daughter shortly after her birth mother died and her birth father reneged on his promise to introduce her to the rest of her family. A version of the book’s first section appeared in The New Yorker in 2004. The publication was problematic and her professionalism was threatened because she shielded her birth father’s identity. "The guy never behaved particularly well but I always felt protective of him because it wasn’t like something he had asked for," she says.

But in 2005 Homes finally opened the "toxic boxes" of papers and photographs and memorabilia rescued from her mother’s apartment after the funeral and kept for years in mini-storage, and The Mistress’s Daughter became a book with a much larger purpose – the exploration of adoption, identity, questions of nature vs. nurture and the very meaning of "family" itself. "I suddenly wanted to be sure that I was going somewhere further, doing something more than just telling that story," Homes says.

One result of this enlargement of purpose was that Homes could no longer protect her birth father’s identity. "I had to be true to the story and not hide from it despite how painful it was for me to tell it and what it might feel like to somebody else," she says. "To not use the names [of her father and his ancestors] meant to negate the story all over again, when the whole point of this is to say that you do have the right to your own life story, that one person cannot decide that you are not allowed your lineage."

Another result of the process was the expansion of Homes’ own emotional point of view. She attained a new understanding and sympathy for her birth mother. And she accepted that her birth father’s family will see him differently than she sees him. "They would because they have a very different experience of him," she says. "Honestly? As you grow up you just realize that life is more complicated and people are more complicated than they first appear, which is kind of a great thing and kind of hard to deal with. It’s hard to reconcile and accept that people who are capable of great things also do horrible things. But the sophisticated approach is to realize that a person can be different and behave differently in different situations."

And it is this movement from personal history to broad understanding that makes A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’s Daughter such a powerful read.

Alden Mudge, who serves as a juror for the Kiriyama Prize, writes from Oakland.

" All stories, they say, begin in one of two ways: A stranger came to town,' or else, I set out upon a journey,'" writes novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The latter theme pervades her new memoir cum investigative nonfiction narrative, a faithful, funny and thought-provoking chronicle of a year in which the author and her family pulled up their big-city stakes and moved from Tucson, Arizona, to a farm in southwestern Virginia. The objective: to spend a year subsisting on food they would raise themselves, or purchase only from local sources, like farmers' markets.

"The project of taking this sort of sabbatical year really was something we had to do as a family," Kingsolver says, speaking from her Virginia farm. "I couldn't do it by myself. And we talked about it for years—it's not something we did overnight." Indeed, the experiment germinated a while; its roots are clearly visible in her essay, Lily's Chickens, (from the 2002 Small Wonder collection) in which she discusses the energy crime of American food transportation and the ethics of responsible eating.

Kingsolver's Appalachian adventure was her response to a conviction that America's food system has been kidnapped, that our nation's food production and consumption habits have been hijacked ("There are ingredients on food labels we can't even pronounce!" she exclaims). She observes that we are now a mostly urban society disconnected from the land the source of our sustenance. "To connect to it, we have to know what farmers do and how vegetables grow. It's a whole area of knowledge that has been lost from our culture in the last two generations," she says.

Contributing to this loss is America's reliance upon highly processed foods across all product lines, with foodstuffs routinely transported worldwide to satisfy our national cravings for any comestible, any time. "Americans put almost as much fossil fuel into our refrigerators as our cars," states Steven L. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband, in the book's first chapter.

As it turns out, this book has not one author, but three. It is a collaborative project that, Kingsolver admits, no one in the family saw coming. "The idea to make a book," she says, "had its genesis in practicality and generosity, a way to inform people about how small, individual lifestyle changes (such as buying food locally and cooking at home) can make a huge difference in quality of life."

And inform it does—accompanying Kingsolver's finely crafted, endearingly personal narrative are information-packed sidebars of no- nonsense prose by Hopp, a biologist. There are also delightful, earnest essays from her 19-year-old daughter, Camille, who comments on the whole adventure, nutritional issues and the sometimes embarrassing (sausage-making!) behaviors of parents. Rounding out this bi-generational perspective are family recipes and weekly meal plans (downloadable from the book's website, www.animalvegetable.com).

Readers—whether vegetarian or carnivore—will not go hungry, literally or literarily. Nor was the Kingsolver-Hopp clan famished during their year of cutting off the industrial pipeline and sinking into the local foodshed. Though Kingsolver reports that it was hard work cultivating the farm, and harvesting and storing the crops for use in the winter months, she says her family thrived on reconnecting with a bounteous earth and its cycles, and derived great pleasure from cooking and eating delicious meals. "This was a project that brought our family together," Kingsolver says.

This year of engaging with the land, of changing eating and purchasing habits, expanded a sense of plenty not scarcity. During our conversation, she reveals that there has been a tremendous interest in the book, even before its publication. And the question people repeatedly ask her is: What was the hardest thing to give up? This confounds Kingsolver, who feels that, in their year of eating consciously, they gained a sense of connection, awareness and fulfillment, and a gratitude for the earth's abundance and generosity. "We didn't drag through the year missing things," she says. "We had such a good time celebrating what we had and celebrating the seasons it's really such a lesson for life, isn't it?" One thing they did not eschew, however, was coffee. "We wheedled out of that one!" she laughs, explaining that they purchased only fair-trade java.

Though they handily solved the coffee conundrum, situations arose that were not so easily dealt with, such as harvesting their livestock for the table. Just before our interview, Kingsolver had been out checking on her animals. "We just had lambs born yesterday," she enthuses. One of the book's most powerful essays, You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day, rationally, but tenderly, discusses how humans kill other life forms from worms, butterflies and broccoli to cattle for sustenance.

"People do get emotional about killing animals, but less than five percent of the population is vegetarian, which means that 95 percent of us eat animals, and we know that somebody killed them," Kingsolver says firmly. She knows that humans don't want to think about this, and says that it's hard for her, too, even though she takes great care in raising and dispatching her animals in the most humane ways possible. "I am a very soft-hearted person," she admits, "and it's difficult to look your food in the eye and face the fact that someone had to kill it for you. But looking at it head-on allows you to make good decisions. Every book I've ever written is about something difficult I don't shrink from raising the difficult questions."

After all our discussion of flora and fauna, I realized I hadn't queried Kingsolver about the third element of her book's title. What, I asked her, was your particular miracle? "Realizing that I could change," she answers, "that I could joyfully embrace a simpler, more sustainable way to live. We can act sensibly, return to our local economies and have a different world. Whether or not people read this book, fossil fuels are going to run out. The dinosaurs are not going to lie down and make more oil."

Alison Hood tends her strawberry patch in sunny California.

What happens when a family of five is unleashed on two unsuspecting grandparents? (No, this is not the premise of the latest reality TV show.) If one of those grandparents happens to be best-selling author and columnist Judith Viorst, the answer is that chaos and hilarity ensue. When we caught up with Viorst, who first immortalized her youngest son in the children’s classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, she had just returned from a week in Maine with her middle son, Nick, and his family. She sounds rested and relaxed, not what you’d expect from someone who has recently conducted her own experiment in multigenerational living. Alexander, his wife and their three young children (ages five, two and four months) needed a place to live while remodeling their house, and the grandparents Viorst graciously offered to accommodate them.

Viorst and her husband of 47 years, Milton, also a noted writer and columnist, welcomed "the Alexander Five," as she lovingly refers to them, into their home with open arms (or, at least, with one arm open and the other deflecting the tidal wave of equipment and miscellany that came in their wake). She knew at the outset that there would be trying moments among the joyful ones and approached the whole undertaking as, she says wryly, "a personal growth experience."

"Anybody who comes in your house with a bunch of little kids is going to change the routine," says Viorst from her rambling three-story house in Washington, D.C., Alexander’s childhood home. For the organized author, embracing the chaos required some effort, as she recounts in her new book, Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days. When "the Five" would leave for the day, and order was briefly restored, she had the chance to reflect on her priorities—and get them straight. How important was it to keep her beloved velvet furniture in pristine condition? OK, well, that was pretty important, but the rest, she realized, fell under the rubric of "letting it go."

"My husband and I were very aware that this moment would not come again, that we had this very precious opportunity with these five quite wonderful people and why muck it up with too much fussing over crumbs or diapers or general mess? You know, I said to myself, get over it! It’ll be back the way you want it soon enough. And the fact was that we really missed them when they left." Sure she enjoyed returning to her less hectic life, but admits that now it’s "too damn peaceful!"

When asked what other challenges she met with along this journey of self-discovery, Viorst says restraining herself from offering too much unsolicited advice was one of the biggest. As she once expressed in her poem, "They may be middle-aged but they’re still my children," Viorst believes in the "state of permanent parenthood." In other words, once a mother, always a mother. "When my kids come to visit for Thanksgiving, you know we’re talking about people in their 40s, and I still want to say, don’t take the car tonight, it’s too icy," she says self-mockingly. "I have the keep-your-mouth-shut conversation with myself, and sometimes I listen and sometimes I don’t."

Also difficult was making sure her son and his wife were adequately stressed out about potential hazards their children might encounter during their stay, whether they be choking, falling or otherwise. She laughs, "The running joke is that I’m always trying to introduce them to new things to worry about. They’re insufficiently anxious."

It should come as no surprise to fans of the quick-witted Viorst that she’s a firm believer in the importance of laughter. "Fortunately everybody is saved from irritation by the fact that we all have senses of humor and are able to laugh about a lot of stuff. I mean, I don’t know how anybody is a member of a family or raises children without being able to laugh," she says.

The young Alexander, however, was not all smiles when he first learned of his eponymous book those many years ago. Viorst read it to him in manuscript form when he was four, and he was furious. "Why you giving me that bad day?" he exclaimed to his mother. "How come Nick doesn’t have a bad day? How come Anthony doesn’t have a bad day? Why you giving me this bad day?" Viorst recalls telling him, "Honey, it isn’t published yet, and we can change the name to Stanley or Walter, but then your name wouldn’t be in great big letters on the front of the book." After a long silence, he responded, "Keep it Alexander."

In one of life’s wonderful continuities, Viorst now loves reading the book to Alexander’s daughter Olivia. "She’s a dream," Viorst says of her undeniably precocious granddaughter. At present, Viorst is steadily working on another children’s book. Though she’s not prepared to say what it’s about, she does allow that it is very much inspired by Olivia, and dedicated to her. In the meantime, readers will be able to enjoy the fall 2008 release of Viorst’s next offering, Nobody Here But Me, a children’s book about a little boy who can’t get anyone’s attention.

As she did with the first book that bears his name, Viorst conferred with Alexander prior to the publication of Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days and made a deal with him and his wife that she wouldn’t release it without their approval. Fortunately for readers, Alexander once again answered in the affirmative, and the result is, as Viorst so aptly and tenderly describes it, "a love song to the family."

Dee Dee Myers is no stranger to spin. As press secretary to Bill Clinton for the first two years of his presidency, she was both the youngest (at age 31) and the first woman to serve in that high-profile position. Though her tenure was short and turbulent, she received generally favorable marks in a difficult assignment. Upon leaving the White House, she consulted on TV’s "The West Wing," where she funneled her White House experience into the character of press secretary C.J. Cregg. Now a mother of two, Myers parses political rhetoric and nuance for a living as a "stay-at-home pundit" for NBC and MSNBC.

But she swears she did not time her long-awaited memoir/manifesto, Why Women Should Rule the World, to hitch a ride on the gender train with the 2008 presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"That’s really all accidental," Myers says. "Obviously, because Hillary Clinton is running such a serious campaign, gender issues are front and center whether anybody foresaw that they would be or not. I feel lucky."

Although she knew Mrs. Clinton "fairly well," their relationship was oblique since Myers reported to the president. Ironically, in a book filled with numerous inspiring women, Hillary Clinton is strangely absent. Was the first lady not a role model for the young press secretary?

"That’s a really good question," Myers says with a sigh. "I sort of made a conscious decision not to write too much about her because I didn’t want the book to be all about her. She was not somebody that I worked for, like Dianne Feinstein, or worked for from a distance, like Geraldine Ferraro, because my focus was so intensely on Bill Clinton. She didn’t have the same kind of personal mentoring relationship with me as some of the other women that I talked about."

Unlike Scott McClellan, former press secretary to George W. Bush whose forthcoming memoir was in the works before his parking space was reassigned, Myers was in no hurry to relive her history-making trial by fire.

"Everything about working in the White House and on a presidential campaign is so intense that I knew I just wanted to let some time pass," Myers explains. "Then I started having babies. If I didn’t have two young kids, I probably would have done this sooner."

True to its title, Myers’ memoir-with-a-mission presents a compelling argument that female rule is the obvious solution to the mess men have made of things to date. Citing dozens of studies that support nature over nurture, Myers explores how innate male aggressiveness has wrecked havoc on everything from the classroom to the boardroom to the Oval Office.

By contrast, she says women are natural consensus-builders and team players whose nurturing instincts would bring about a more peaceful and prosperous world, given the chance. In fact, she cites studies that suggest that the leadership, patience and time management skills involved in childrearing are just what America needs today to reinvent itself along more sustainable lines.

On those grounds, Myers has no problem defending Hillary Clinton’s campaign claim to 36 years of experience.

"I think you see things and experience things and learn things about power and the way the presidency works from that front row seat that you couldn’t learn from many places. I think that is a legitimate claim to experience," she says. "She was the first First Lady to come to the White House with a career that had been very much separate from her husband’s. I don’t think we need to denigrate her experience and her contributions because she was ‘just the wife.’ "

Both women shared the eye-opening experience of suddenly being swept by the electoral tide onto the foreign shores of the Potomac. "

Being 31, female and from California was like the trifecta of how not to go to Washington," Myers chuckles. "My learning curve was pretty steep. But [Hillary] became what I didn’t have to become, which was kind of a Rorschach test on how we felt about women in power and wives and their proper roles."

Myers was reluctant to take the job when George Stephanopoulos offered it to her. It had all the earmarks of the classic woman’s double bind, responsibility without the authority. Her instincts proved correct: She was frequently left out of the loop on important decisions, then blasted by the press corps for withholding information. She had no illusions about why she was there.

"I think the president wanted to give me the title because I was a woman, because I had been a loyal campaign aide and he liked me," she says. "He wanted credit for naming the first woman to that position and I got it; I understood."

Myers admits she much prefers politics from the sidelines these days. She occasionally has lunch and compares notes with current White House press secretary Dana Perino, the second woman to hold the job. "I don’t have any desire to get back into it," she says. "I like being an observer."

Myers admits to torn loyalties in the 2008 Democratic race; while she finds "a lot to admire" about Hillary, her sister works for Barack Obama. Which candidate does she think will ultimately prevail?

"I’ve always believed that a war of attrition favors Hillary Clinton because when you get down in the trenches, everybody gets dirty. Everybody already thinks the Clintons are a little dirty, but if Obama gets dirty, then I think he loses much of what has made him Obama. And that’s the hell of this crazy system; it’s very hard to run as a reformer. That’s why reformers never win. And I think that’s too bad."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin.

When she recently crossed into a new decade of life, Reeve Lindbergh – author of several novels, nonfiction books and children's books – began exploring for herself a famous pronouncement by her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh: 60 is "the youth of old age." Her musings on this subject are contained in a wonderful new collection of essays, Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age – and Other Unexpected Adventures. The book's title leaves no doubt as to Lindbergh's viewpoint on growing older. "I am prepared for delight," she writes in the opening essay.

Speaking from the farm in Vermont which has been her home for the past 35 years and where she and her husband, Nat Tripp, still raise chickens and sheep, Lindbergh revels in what she terms the joys of growing older. "It has to do with a kind of freedom that you feel as you get older," she says. "You don't have to worry about being what one of my mother's friends called 'The Belle of Newport.' . . . It isn't all about what I see in the mirror." Whatever drawbacks Lindbergh may find in growing older – everything from the aches and pains of the body to the aching of the soul when a loved one is gone – she never loses sight of what is important to her. "Getting old is what I want to do," she writes. "Getting old, whatever the years bring, is better by far than not getting old. . . . I am going to be sixty years old on my next birthday. This seems very old to me on some days. Then my friend Nardi Campion, almost ninety, writes about aging with the words, 'Oh, to be eighty-seven again!' and my thinking changes. If I can't be twelve years old forever, then when I grow up I want to be Nardi."

Lindbergh's sense of humor spills over into much of Forward From Here, whether in a hilarious account of capturing a large snapping turtle as a gift for her husband or in the description of her friend Noel Perrin's adventures with the Department of Motor Vehicles. One of the strengths of the essays is the way Lindbergh uses everyday occurrences or small rites of passage as springboards to larger issues. Musing on another friend's habitual lateness becomes a question – can we give ourselves permission to go through life more slowly? The joy of a friend's annual visit at Thanksgiving becomes the universal grief we feel from death, grief manifested by the inability of Lindbergh's husband to make Brussels sprouts, the friend's favorite dish, for their next holiday meal. Helping her mother downsize becomes a metaphor for the mental clutter we often carry around for no good reason; it is also a prelude to what will inevitably come to pass. And yet, even in situations such as disposing of someone's ashes, she can find humor.

Laughter is an integral part of life for Lindbergh, and one she is gratified to see echoed in the senior citizens she teaches in her writing workshops. "They're very funny. In spite of everything else, they're living. Everybody has losses, and aches and pains, but there's no loss of sense of humor, no loss of enjoyment of life, and it's fun to be with those ladies. You look at them and think, being a little old lady isn't so bad!" And there's another advantage to gray hair and wrinkles Lindbergh hadn't anticipated. "I think for me it's such fun because I know I look like my mother. I knew her at this age. It makes me feel as if she's back again, a little bit." Lindbergh wrote about her mother's final months of life in 2001's No More Words. It was from her mother that she learned the habit of daily journaling, something she continues to this day. "It's not so much that it captures anything, although I suppose that's the way you think about it, but it's that you're marking your own life in a way that seems important," she says.

Reading her old journals also is a reflection of how Lindbergh has changed and the ways in which she has remained the same. "As a younger woman, I think I was much harder on myself for not getting things done, not doing things well – sort of a sense of berating myself quite a bit. And yet, I've looked at my mother's diaries about the same time, and she did the same thing, so that's interesting," she laughs. "And I think also, as a younger woman with kids and a career starting, you're apt to have pretty high expectations of yourself and your life. It's very different now. . . .

The kids seem to be OK and the work seems to be more or less OK. I don't have that pressure that I see in many young women." The final essay in Forward From Here is about Lindbergh's late father, famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. A postscript of sorts to an earlier memoir, Under a Wing, it was written after she learned her father had three secret families in Europe. Having listened to his many lectures on proper moral and ethical behavior while growing up, she now found herself with a bevy of half-brothers and sisters and a revised image of the man who lived by a different set of standards than those he taught his children. "I raged against his duplicitous character, his personal conduct, the years of deception and hypocrisy," she writes in Forward From Here.

Once her anger cooled, however, her viewpoint changed. The fact that her father had four families which he kept apart now seems to her "unutterably lonely." "Yes, that's the truth," she says. "People say, 'Oh yeah, right! All these women and all that.' But what a restless, lonely spirit. And so much secrecy. It makes me sad, actually, and not for us and not for the other families, because I know them now and they're OK. But for him. Unutterable loneliness." Although Forward From Here is Reeve Lindbergh's personal exploration of growing older, it is a book for all age groups to enjoy and appreciate. Its themes are universal and her opinions both realistic and comforting. As she writes, "Everything happens in life. Some of what happens is terrible. We know this is true . . . But there is another truth available. . . .

The living of a life, day by day and moment by moment, is also wild with joy."

Rebecca Bain was the host for many years of the public radio author interview program, "The Fine Print." She lives in Nashville.

When he was a child, growing up dirt-poor in a small Alabama town, Rick Bragg seldom had any coins jingling in his pocket. But even if he had, he would never have spent a penny on a Father's Day card.

As Bragg chronicled so eloquently in his best-selling memoir, All Over but the Shoutin' (1997), his father was a hard-fisted, abusive alcoholic whose lust for whiskey far outweighed any feeling of obligation to his family. When he finally abandoned his wife and three sons, young Rick had scant good memories of Charles Bragg, none of them worthy of a card celebrating fatherhood.

But at age 46, Rick Bragg inherited his own son when the confirmed bachelor surprised himself and everyone else by marrying a tall, red-headed woman, who was "just a little bit slinky." Stumbling into the role of stepfather to a 10-year-old boy not only made Bragg examine his position in this new relationship, it also made him want to learn more about his own father. The result is the third in his series of family memoirs, The Prince of Frogtown.

Speaking from his office at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he is a professor of writing (a title he finds quite amusing), Bragg elaborated on his desire to investigate the life of a man he reviled in his first memoir a decade ago.

"I'm older now and having a boy of my own makes me look at things differently," Bragg says. "I did not want to vanish from this world and have people believe that was all he was. As I said in the book, I've written an awful lot about people in prison, and I've written how they're there for their worst moment on earth – because they caught their wife cheating on them, or they saw some ugly look, you know, and they did something that brands them and sums them up forever. But it's not all they are. I guess in a way we were my daddy's worst moment. But it's not all he was, and I wanted to find people who would say something good about him. And I did." For three years Bragg tracked down his father's friends and the family members who knew him before alcohol turned him into the bitter, brutal man Bragg remembers.

"More than anything, I wanted to write about my daddy as a little boy because I didn't know anything about him. He never said to me, 'When I was a boy, I did this.' I wanted to see what he was like as a 12-year-old, I wanted to see what he was like as a teenager. And now I know." Although he grew up near Jacksonville, Alabama, the mill town where his father spent most of his life, Bragg felt that to understand the man he needed to know more about the people whose lives depended upon its giant textile factory. Talking to the workers who breathed cotton dust day after day to earn their paltry paychecks made Rick's admiration for them turn into something much deeper.

"People sometimes talk about Southerners and working-class folks, blue-collar folks, with this kind of hokey charm – aren't they quaint? Well, you know, people bled into their machines, they lost pieces of themselves at work, they stood over these machines for 12 hours at a time and did a job that quite frankly, most people just aren't tough enough to do," Bragg says.

The Prince of Frogtown alternates between two worlds. One chapter explores the father who is gradually becoming a more fully realized person to Bragg. The next examines his own attempts to understand the boy who has become his son. The hardscrabble existence Bragg endured as a child often has him baffled by a 10-year-old who still takes comfort in a "blankey," who demands to be tucked in at night, who wants hugs and hand-holding. But Bragg wasn't just afraid his son might never be "tough enough." As he writes in the book, his fears went deeper.

"I didn't care if he rode bulls or danced ballet, and that's the truth. But what made me crazy was the idea that he was the kind of boy I used to despise, the kind who looked down his nose on the boy I was. That was it, I realized. . . . That was what needled me. My mother cleaned their houses, cooked for them, diapered them. I would not have a boy like that." But even though this boy was growing up with privileges Bragg couldn't have imagined at that age, he discovered his son has a generous spirit, not a condemning one. "I was worried he might not like my people, or worse than that, he would feel a detachment or separation – which never materialized," Bragg says. "He's a good boy and he's got a good heart and he loves going home to see my people." Juxtaposing what he learned about his father's life with what Bragg feels are his own shortcomings as a parent doesn't change the countless ways Charles Bragg betrayed his wife and sons. But it does give Rick Bragg a better understanding of the man who died young from three things: bad luck, bad decisions and too much whiskey.

"I didn't try to recreate some daddy for myself in this book—that's the least of the things that happen in it. I just wanted to know who he was as a boy and as a young man, before he fell apart. I don't think that would be too hard for people to understand, to see why I would want that to happen." Bragg also heard from Jack Andrews, his father's lifelong friend, who contributed what is probably the saddest story in this eloquent, beautifully written and moving book. Right up until the day he died, Charles Bragg continued to talk about how much he loved his wife and boys and how much he regretted the way things turned out. As Bragg writes in The Prince of Frogtown, it wasn't enough. But it was more than he had before.

"I wish it had been different, but I cannot see it. I cannot see him living off his pension, or singing a hymn, or lining up to vote. I cannot see him going home to a paid-for house, with pictures of his boys on the wall. And I cannot see her there with him, to make it complete. But now I know he did see it, and that has to be worth something." Rebecca Bain, formerly the host of the public radio author interview program, "The Fine Print," writes from her home in Nashville.

For true believers who wish confidently upon stars and blow out their birthday candles with sure expectation, Noelle Oxenhandler's new memoir will surely please – while perhaps winning over a nay-saying wish skeptic or two. The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul follows a year in the author's life as she decides to try "Putting It Out There." An essayist and Buddhist practitioner, Oxenhandler is facing 50, with a painful divorce and spiritual upheaval behind her, when she finds herself ready for change. She openly, though doubtfully, plunges into "wishcraft" and declares three desires: to purchase a house, find a new man and heal her soul. With honesty, humor and soulfulness, the author chronicles her year-long effort to "desire, ask, believe, receive," exploring the ancient mysteries of wishing, facing her ambivalence about desire and negotiating the intricacies of focus and receptivity. Wishes can come true, she tells BookPage, with a bit of "vision, hope and hard work."

As an essayist who loves logic and rigorous argument, what led you to try your hand at the uncertain mysteries of wishing?

After having lived in the cold, gray snowbelt of upstate New York for 15 years, when I returned to California – which is where I grew up – it felt already as though a great wish had come true. It seemed natural, then, to reclaim other lost loves – like painting – and that led to my first real experiment in wishing.

How did you reconcile your spiritual background with your desire for material things?

I think there actually was a kind of conversion experience that happened for me in the course of my experiment. In various ways I was led to shed my previous incarnation as a "wish snob" and to open myself to the touching humanness of wishing for things – not just spiritual things, but very concrete and tangible things too. Now I've come to feel that so long as we stay aware of the relative importance of things, there's really no contradiction between wanting "a happy death" and wanting a puppy dog (to use an example from John F. Kennedy's childhood).

Though your three heartfelt wishes came true, you still take wishing with "a grain of salt." What is "the grain of salt that hasn't dissolved" for you?

I think the grain of salt is more temperamental than anything. I simply do have a skeptical nature, and I'm superstitious about courting too much earthly happiness! And then I really do believe that the greatest happiness of all comes when we are able to wish for what is. One of the supreme experiences in my life occurred years ago during a 100-day training period in a Zen monastery in northern California. One extremely hot day I was assigned to the utterly disgusting job of feeding rotting garbage into a compost machine, which then sent this stinking splatter all over me! For the first three hours, I thought I was in hell. It was so bad that at some point, something inside me shifted and I let go of all resistance. After the noon break, I found myself rushing back to the garbage heap as though I was going to meet a lover! I couldn't wait to get back there because I had discovered the incredible sense of freedom that comes when we realize that we can be happy no matter what our circumstances.

The Wishing Year could very well kick off a national wishing movement. Do you believe that, employed collectively, wishing could have greater positive impacts and benefits for humankind?

Yes, I really do believe that. In my now 50-plus years of existence, I feel that I personally have never witnessed such a globally dark and dangerous time – a time when the very fate of the earth is in question. The temptation to despair is so very great – and the act of wishing is a very powerful antidote to despair. But not passive wishing. What's needed is that good old-fashioned combination of forward-looking vision, hope and hard work.

Do you plan to continue practicing "wishcraft"? If so, what will you wish for when you blow candles out on your birthday cake?

Well, I really don't want to sound like a "wish snob," but right now – and to a large extent thanks to my wishing year – I'm feeling as though most of my significant personal desires have been met. So, apart from my wishes from this fragile planet of ours, I'm wishing that those who are younger than me and facing big transitions – in my own life, that would be my daughter, my sister and my students – will find happiness in their unfolding paths. As to my own more tangible desires for myself: I confess that when I blew out the candles on my last birthday cake, I wished that The Wishing Year would do well!