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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

Chapman, for one, was counting on it.

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

But it was one wild ride while it lasted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orange crates sealed with bumper stickers float, but not for long. So John Pollack discovered when he built his first boat at age six. Far from being discouraged, the young boy decided that someday, he’d build a boat from something that couldn’t sink: corks. Over the next 25 years, Pollack pursued other dreams, working as a White House speechwriter and a foreign correspondent in Spain, but he never stopped saving corks. His new book, Cork Boat, is a lively, memorable account of the attempt to make his dream a reality.

The Cork Boat project began in earnest in 1999. "I wanted to start the new century with a big project, and the time seemed ripe to launch the boat," Pollack tells BookPage over the phone from his New York City apartment. He’d found a business partner in Garth Goldstein, an architectural student whose design expertise would be crucial to the boat’s success. Realizing they’d never save enough corks on their own, Pollack and Goldstein printed out flyers and handed them out to local restaurants and bars, asking them to save their corks for the project. Pollack was met with one of two reactions: immediate excitement and support, or a blank stare. Neither fazed him. "If you’re building a cork boat, you can’t take yourself too seriously, because it’s such a goofy project. And I think that if you can laugh at yourself, other people are willing to laugh with you."

To build the boat, Pollack and Goldstein designed a honeycomb "cell" of corks rubber-banded together in the shape of a hexagon. These cells would be bound together to form logs, which in turn would construct the Viking-like ship. To help band the corks together—first at Pollack’s kitchen table, then in the garage of Goldstein’s rented house, soon dubbed the Mount Pleasant Boat Works—Pollack used his way with words to recruit friends and neighbors, holding boat-building parties late into the night. He solicited help from the California-based Cork Supply, USA, which generously donated many of their test corks to help Pollack and Goldstein collect the 165,000 corks that they would need to complete the project. Still, building the boat was much more complicated than Pollack had imagined.

"The most unexpected aspect of the whole project was how hard it was. There were several times where I thought, this is impossible. And there were several times when I felt like quitting. My mom was instrumental in saying, ‘you can’t quit, not now if you do you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’ And mom was right."

The hard work of so many people paid off when, in April of 2002, Cork Supply called with a proposal: would Pollack and Goldstein be willing to come to Portugal in June and sail the boat down the Douro River? It wasn’t the wine country route that Pollack had originally envisioned, but he enthusiastically agreed. He and Goldstein spent the next two months in furious production, putting finishing touches on the boat and correcting problems they’d noticed during the boat’s first launch on the Potomac the previous October. But once again, the difference between dreams and reality gave the team a wake-up call. The trip, far from the idyll Pollack had imagined, "ended up being 17 days of hard rowing," he admits ruefully. "But the struggle made it all the more worthwhile; if it had been easy, it wouldn’t have been so meaningful."

Pollack’s evocative description of the ups and downs of his remarkable journey creates an unusual memoir of one man’s struggle to live a childhood dream. He hopes it will inspire others to do the same. "One of the reasons I wrote Cork Boat was because I wanted to story to live. Years from now, someone’s going to be looking for a book to read, and they’ll see Cork Boat, pull it off the shelf and read the story, and the journey will continue."

African orphan transforms the life of a foreign correspondent Neely Tucker, a foreign correspondent for The Detroit Free Press and Knight Ridder, was transferred in 1997 from his post as a roving reporter in Eastern Europe to Zimbabwe. When he wasn’t traveling on assignment in war-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa, Tucker and his wife, Vita, volunteered at an orphanage in the capital city of Harare.

The orphanage, probably the best in the country, was woefully underfunded. A shocking number of infants fell sick and died. Tucker and his wife began to care for one of the most gravely ill of these children, an infant girl named Chipo (which means "gift" to the Shona-speaking majority of Zimbabweans) who had been abandoned in a field just moments after she was born. Very quickly, the childless couple decided to adopt Chipo.

Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir is Tucker’s completely absorbing account of the couple’s efforts to overcome both a maddening social service bureaucracy and a deep cultural prejudice against foreign adoptions and gain Chipo as their daughter. Good writer that he is, Tucker also tells a story of larger and deeper human transformations.

"To say that this is an adoption book or a book about Africa is like saying The English Patient is about Egypt and World War II," Tucker says during a call to his desk at The Washington Post, where he has been a staff writer since returning from Zimbabwe in 2000. "Egypt and the war frame the experiences of the characters in that novel, just as the adoption and Africa framed my experiences. But what I hope people will understand this book to be about is a time in your life when you put everything on the table, when you just risk everything."

One of the most important things Tucker risked for Chipo and Vita was his career as a journalist. Being a reporter, Tucker says, "was not just a job I showed up to do. It was my life." And Tucker was not merely a journalist, but one of those rare journalists who sought the toughest assignments, who "had the working idea that there was a higher form of truth to be found in the world’s most impoverished and violent places, a rough-hewn honesty that could not be found elsewhere." As a result, some of the most horrifying and exalted moments in Love in the Driest Season are Tucker’s brief narratives about people and events he witnessed in war zones in Eastern Europe and Africa.

The decision to adopt Chipo complicated Tucker’s dedication to his work as a foreign correspondent. "I just didn’t think it was the responsible thing to do to spend my time that way anymore. The third time you’re in Bujumbura staying in the same crappy hotel doing another story that will run on page A15 while your only child in this life learns to smile or walk or has her first day in school, you start asking yourself why you’re doing this."

At the same time, the political situation in Zimbabwe was becoming darker. According to Tucker, Zimbabwe has long been considered "Africa 101. That is, it was as easy as Africa gets. The country worked pretty well, the literacy rate was pretty high, the hospitals were OK, you could go to the grocery store, pay with your credit card and get just about everything off the shelf there that you can get here." Beneath the social veneer, however, unnoticed by the casual tourist, AIDS was decimating extended families, which more or less functioned as the country’s social support network; families, hospitals and orphanages were overwhelmed. New and popular political parties challenged the corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe and Mugabe reacted by going after the messengers. Foreign journalists were intimidated. Tucker’s phone was tapped and his family was threatened. Not wanting to jeopardize the adoption, Tucker began to avoid reporting about Zimbabwe. "I think I’m harsher on myself than anybody at Knight Ridder would be," he says, "but from my standpoint, my career went down the tubes. Not in something I did but in something I didn’t do. I didn’t write untrue stories, but I just didn’t do my job." Tucker eventually took a leave of absence to complete the adoption.

The adoption transformed Tucker, but that is not the only transformation in this story. Tucker was born in the poorest county in Mississippi and as a child attended an all-white private academy. When, as a reporter, he was hired by the Free Press and moved to Detroit, he met and eventually married Vita, an African-American widow who remembered Mississippi from childhood trips as a place so "bad that as a black person from Detroit, you were actually grateful to get to Alabama." Neither family was thrilled with the marriage, but Tucker’s was the more resistant. "I told Vita when we got married that I never expected to be reunited with my family, and Vita said, well, you might just be surprised,’ " Tucker remembers. Because of her religious conviction, his mother eventually got a passport and flew for 14 hours to Poland, where the couple was living while Tucker covered Eastern Europe, and apologized to Vita. His father changed with the arrival of Chipo.

"My father had been abandoned by his old man when he was two days old, and he just identified immediately with Chipo," Tucker says. "He’s not a touchy-feely guy. He doesn’t talk about his emotions. He was a guy who had been abandoned by his father and had mentioned it only once to my mother. And he just took to Chipo."

Tucker writes in Love in the Driest Season that "race has been the defining issue of my life." In conversation, he says, "It would be silly not to be optimistic. From when and where I was raised and from when and where Vita was raised, it’s much better today, it’s insanely better, it’s ridiculously better."

And Chipo? She’s better too. "She knows absolutely everything about where she came from," Tucker says. "She’ll tell you she’s from Zimbabwe. She’ll tell you she’s a pretty girl from Africa. That’s how she’ll introduce herself." And that’s a happy ending to a pretty amazing story.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

The Sparks brothers recount a round-the-world adventure This experience started the way any Nicholas Sparks novel might a Notre Dame alumni brochure arrived at the author's North Carolina home advertising a three-week travel tour by private jet to see the world's most exotic sights: Machu Picchu in Peru, the stone heads of Easter Island, Ayers Rock in Australia, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, India's famed Taj Mahal, the rock cathedrals of Ethiopia, the Hypogeum in Malta and the northern lights of Tromso, Norway.

Sparks, an admitted Type A personality, was deep into the writing of Nights in Rodanthe in the spring of 2002 amid the merry daily cacophony of three sons, twin daughters, barking dogs and parcel deliveries. Drop it all for a trip around the world? Sure, he thought, maybe someday.

But he couldn't shake the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When his wife Cathy pragmatically begged off but encouraged him to enlist his brother Micah instead, the stage was set for Three Weeks with My Brother, a poignant, funny and ultimately life-affirming family memoir/travelogue that only the Sparks brothers could have written.

Fans of Nicholas Sparks' novels The Notebook, Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, A Bend in the Road may be surprised to learn that the author's life has known the same emotional turmoil he brings so vividly to life in his fiction. By their mid-30s, the Sparks brothers had lost their mother at 47 to a freak horse-riding accident, their kid sister Dana to brain cancer and their father to a traffic accident. They were the lone surviving members of a family that had managed to rise from Nebraska poverty to middle-class academia in Sacramento, California, and produce two sons who would prosper beyond their wildest expectations: Nicholas sold The Notebook for $1 million weeks before his 30th birthday; Micah parlayed a real estate career into several successful businesses.

It was time to put it all into perspective, to revisit the best and worst times of a past shared as best pals, track teammates, devil's advocates, constant supporters, and above all, brothers. It was time to celebrate their survival.

BookPage caught up with the Sparks brothers in a conference call; Nicholas spoke from North Carolina, Micah from his home in northern California.

Which came first, the trip or the idea for a book? "We kind of had an idea that we would write something together, so we both took notes the whole way through the trip," says Nicholas. "I mean, you're on an airplane for six and seven hours at a stretch, there are only so many bad movies you can watch." "We knew we would relate the story of our family and the brothers," Micah adds. "And of course we're on this magnificent trip around the world, so after we got back, we started working on how to weave the two stories together. That structure was the hardest thing about the book." Being suddenly alone together, away from their wives and families, put both brothers in a reflective mood.

"On Easter Island, we were on our way to see our first Moai (giant statue) and there were all these horses just running free and we both immediately thought about mom, it just hits you," says Nicholas. "She loved horses. She could spot a horse flying down the highway." But it didn't take long for their natural Wally-and-Beav playfulness to surface. In Three Weeks, the two revisit their favorite childhood pranks, from denuding a whole neighborhood of Christmas lights to blowing up mailboxes with supercharged fireworks to one particularly narrow brush with disaster in an abortive William Tell scenario.

On the trip, their inner kids grew restless and a bit punchy over all the antiquities. "It's a jar and a bowl!" says Nicholas. "We saw lots of jars and bowls." It was Micah who failed the Ayers Rock appreciation test: "Yeah, it's a big rock in the middle of Australia; they took us out there numerous times to look at the big rock before sunrise, after sunrise, in 105-degree heat with flies. In the end, it's one big rock in the middle of the desert." Their best moments were spent off the beaten path, in pubs and chatting with everyday people: cab drivers, waitresses, bellhops and the like. In Cambodia, where the devastation wrought by the Khmer Rouge has given rise to a young but vigorously upbeat population, they had an encounter they will never forget.

"We went through a high school it is now the Holocaust museum where they tortured people, and our tour guide had gone to that high school; his brother had become a Khmer Rouge, so they were on opposite sides," says Micah. "And for him to go back to his high school and see bloodstains on the floor and the spikes and the shackles . . . he had his whole family wiped out by the Khmer Rouge! But they still smile and have a sense of humor." The poverty of India still haunts them: "It blew me away to learn that India, which is just a little bigger than Texas, has one billion, 250 million people, five times our population, just smashed into this country with no resources," says Micah.

Once home, the brothers recreated the gut-wrenching family memories by exchanging faxes between coasts. Nicholas wrote Three Weeks from his own point of view, but most of the memories were shared and hard won. "There were scenes that were very hard for us to write," says Nicholas. "These are not memories we want to remember." For those, Nicholas and Micah can turn to their last night in Norway, arms intertwined in a local pub: "They had this song where the Norwegians would sing these long verses and then the Americans would shout out the chorus I can't tell you what it was, something in Norwegian and we would boom it out at the top of our lungs, and they would all crack up. So at the end they said, Hey, do you know what you were saying?' And we said no, and they said, It means, you're beautiful and I'm warm and naked.'" Micah laughs. "They have long nights in Norway and they enjoy them." Jay MacDonald belts a mean karaoke version of "Born on the Bayou."

The author of the bestsellers All I Need To Know I Learned from My Cat and My Dog's the World's Best Dog, Suzy Becker was proceeding with her career as a writer-illustrator when she was diagnosed in 1999 with a tumor that would require brain surgery. In a new illustrated memoir, I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse? Becker gives a poignant and funny account of her journey to recovery. Known for her starkly original perspective, Becker shares the story behind the book in the "interview" that follows.

Behind the Book: This new book is such a departure from your previous work did you ever consider calling it All I Need to Know I Learned from My CAT-scan? [We laugh.] Seriously, what inspired you to write it?

Me: I think it was the fourth or fifth day after the operation. I was laid up at home, recuperating from a bunionectomy, not officially back to work and the idea came to me. Kind of one of those eureka moments. I picked up the phone, called my editor. And I remember her reaction exactly: Bunion surgery?! No one's going to want to read a book about bunion surgery! I didn't agree, I still don't. I think people will read about anything if it's good or interesting or funny enough, but . . . a week later, there was a videotape in my mailbox. She had focus-grouped my book idea. The people in the focus group all wanted to read about brain surgery.

BTB: You got the idea from a focus group?

Me: Not really. But none of this is real—I'm making the whole interview up, as in there is no Behind the Book behind Behind the Book.

BTB: I'll go along. What inspired you to write the book, really?

Me: Not the obvious answer. . . . I never felt inspired to write this book, like I did with the cat or dog book; I felt compelled. At the time (May 1999), I was planning to write and illustrate an altogether different memoir, a book about my decision whether or not to have a baby. I had applied for a fellowship at Harvard to work on it in the fall. Three days after I found out I got the fellowship, I had the grand mal seizure that led to the diagnosis of the mass on my left parietal lobe and then the brain surgery. If everything had gone according to plan, I think I still would have written the other book. Maybe included a chapter on the brain surgery. But, the surgery, an awake craniotomy, which carried some risk to my upper-right-side mobility (my drawing hand) ended up unexpectedly messing up my language abilities: speech, reading and writing. No one knew how long the problems would last. Twenty-four hours stretched into 18 months. I went to Harvard in the fall anyway (two months after my surgery), commuting in to Boston for speech therapy, basically keeping to myself, and my notebook. I made notes about everything.

My handwriting and sentence formation were frighteningly crude right after the surgery (the actual notes are in the book), but by the fall, my notebook had become a source of comfort, a confidante. Forget about speech problems just saying the words "brain surgery" sucks the air out of a room. I talked to the notebook.

Eventually, I had to start working on a book. A colloquium (a word I was never able to say until after I left Harvard) presentation is the only requirement of the fellowship year. Mine was scheduled for March. The baby decision book was out of the question I was on birth-defect causing anti-seizure medication up through November. When I finally sat down to write, I was forced to write what I knew, and there was really only one topic I knew anything about.

BTB: You mentioned that people don't really want to talk about the subject. Were you worried that they wouldn't want to read about it?

Me: Sure. And I worried that there wasn't a book in it. Every day of the fellowship year, I wondered whether I would have thought any of it was funny if things had turned out worse. There was a Fellow across the hall whose sister had died of brain cancer the summer I had my surgery. Writing the book it took me three years was my recovery. I am grateful to Harvard and to Peter Workman for publishing it.

BTB: What about the baby decision book?

Me: What about the bunion surgery book?

I had forgotten what a rushing torrent of words spills from Charles Siebert’s mouth when his passions are up. I had forgotten how casually he drops arresting metaphors into normal conversation. I had forgotten how humorously, obsessively he tracks a thought through the circuitous digressions of life’s hum and drum to arrive at an unexpected observation. I had forgotten just how frighteningly articulate he can be.

It’s been – what? – more than 20 years since Chuck and I last ran into each other on New York’s Upper West Side, several years after we had graduated from college. Memories fade. In the long in-between, Siebert has produced a steady stream of poems, essays and articles that have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. He had a role in John Sayles’ movie Eight Men Out. In late 1984, he moved to Brooklyn, where every writer in the world now seems to reside, and has lived in the same building ever since. He shares his sixth-floor apartment’s "glorious view of Manhattan" with his wife, novelist Bex Brian. He has published two well-regarded books, an "autobiography" of his Jack Russell Terrier, Angus, and a remarkable memoir/prose rhapsody called Wickerby. Despite writing frequently about medical research, especially on matters related to the heart, he still doesn’t have health insurance.

Siebert relates most of this during the early, catch-me-up part of our conversation about his superb new book A Man After His Own Heart. It’s gratifying how easily we settle into familiar conversation. But it’s only when Siebert refers to youth as an unselfconscious time when "you’re in the porch-swing of your own bones, you’re settled into yourself and are just staring out at the world with a kind of awe," that I think, oh now this, this is the wordsmithing poet I palled around with on the Binghamton campus.

But of course that is not true. Siebert is a far different and far better writer than I knew or could even have imagined 25 years ago. In Wickerby and even more so in A Man After His Own Heart, Siebert has forged a unique sort of nonfiction work, something he doesn’t quite know how to characterize: "It’s so many different things at once – memoir, prose poem, rhapsody, I don’t know," he says. But no matter what you ultimately call this particular type of literary work, it informs and it sings, and if the talent gods are just, A Man After His Own Heart will be Siebert’s breakthrough book.

Viewed from a wide angle, A Man After His Own Heart is an account of the night in December 1998 when Siebert participated in a "heart harvest," traveling to New Jersey with a team of surgeons to remove the heart from the body of a recently deceased young woman, and then returning to New York to deliver the heart to a waiting transplant recipient. From this angle you read about: the technicalities of heart transplants; new scientific discoveries about the biology of the heart and the genetic disorders that influence heart disease; the emotional and biological interplay of the brain and the heart; the fascinating history of diminutive, feisty William Harvey’s trip to Padua in the 16th century to view the dissection of human corpses (which would lead to the discovery of the body’s "ever recurring circulation of the blood").

You read, too, about: the patients who wait desperately for donor hearts; the distressing experiences of people who have lived with mechanical hearts; and of the political-sociological hierarchy of a heart harvest and the drama that hierarchy engenders. All of which Siebert portrays magnificently.

To present the book’s unbelievably varied subjects as this sort of laundry list, however, is to miss the beauty and drive of Siebert’s narrative approach. "I go off on all these tangents," he says. "I have the most indulgent, digressive of first-person voices." Which is the closest Charles Siebert may ever come to understatement. In fact, Siebert’s mind wanders like a relaxed fisherman, following the lure of his thoughts and meditations out among the currents, pools and eddies of fact and metaphor until the anxious reader may want to tap him gently on the shoulder and remind him that there is, after all, a heart harvest going on and he might want to attend to it. But such digressions brim with insight and provocation and are narrated in language that is simply marvelous.

One of Siebert’s purposes in writing this book is to make visible what he calls in conversation "these vast invisible inscapes of ourselves." Hence his fascination with such recent science as the discovery that "humans borrow the same muscle fiber mechanism that allows a fly’s wing to beat at 150 beats a second. It’s as if Nature is this great artificer that finds it needs to make a heart and suddenly remembers the fly wing design and pulls it off the shelf to serve the heart design. That kind of thing blows my mind."

Another of Siebert’s overriding purposes is to explore the heart as metaphor, as the traditional location of human feeling. Thus Siebert writes movingly and with surprising directness about his relationship with his father, who suffered from heart disease throughout Siebert’s adolescence and early adulthood, and who may have passed on the faulty gene responsible for that disease to his son. "In the early drafts I found myself shying away from going far into my father, but then I found that once I’d opened that Pandora’s Box the only way to go was to go as far into it as possible, make a whole character of him, otherwise I’d be cheating the readers. And to my joy, people have told me the book gets stronger as it gets more personal."

Siebert doesn’t see the science of the heart and the poetics of the heart as being in conflict. Quite the contrary. "This is not a time for poets to be throwing up their hands and saying, Ahh, science has taken away all our wonder,’ " he exclaims. "There’s a tendency in human thought to dismiss ourselves from our own biology and live up in the ether that our very biology creates. What I’m saying is wait a minute, look what the new science is showing us. It is in a way bearing out all the intuitive myths of the past."

Alden Mudge, of Oakland, California, is a juror for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

Rock ‘n’ roll bridges the generation gap Somewhere around the time his 11-year-old daughter grew bored with listening to his Beach Boys mix tapes and started worshipping Britney Spears, it dawned on Carl Lennertz that if he wanted to impart what he knew of life to his only child, he’d better do it soon. Lennertz wasn’t too sure how many actual pearls of wisdom he had to pass along when he began scratching out short, humorous essays that compare and contrast his small-town Long Island boyhood in the ’60s to his daughter’s midtown Manhattan upbringing in the ’90s. As a 20-year veteran of the New York publishing world, Lennertz knew everything about books except how to write one. For that, it took a father’s love, a dash of chutzpah and some of that old-time rock ‘n’ roll to reel in the 40 years between them.

Cursed by a Happy Childhood is Lennertz’s sweet and funny mix tape, a greatest-hits package of parental moments big and small, combined with a fond look back at his own boyhood spent happily lost in the music that changed the world.

“There was a New Yorker cartoon three weeks ago where a little girl says, gee, Mom and Dad, thank you for the happy childhood. Now I have nothing to write about,” Lennertz chuckles by phone from New York. “We have lived through 20 years of very depressing books about childhood, from Mary Karr [The Liars’ Club] to [Augusten Burroughs’] Running with Scissors. I didn’t read those, I didn’t feel that I wanted to, but that was their exorcism. I just sat down one day and started writing to my daughter and thought, geez, I have mostly only good things to talk about.” Lennertz began framing his fatherly missives on the night after George Harrison died. The soundtrack of his life was never far from his thoughts as he assiduously avoided the usual parental topics (sleepless nights, changing diapers, etc.), concentrating instead on less-plowed fields such as “home echhhhh,” getting braces and the joys of comic books. As he wrote, he found that reflecting on his childhood love of rock ‘n’ roll lifted a kind of inner velvet rope, admitting him to a vast common ground between father and daughter.

“I wanted it to be like a record album where the songs are paced: fast song, slow song. It is slightly chronological, and I tried to pace it with some serious stuff and then quickly go back to a lighter piece. Things get slightly more serious as it goes on. I start with collecting comic books and end up talking about drugs and drink.” As Cursed came together, his publisher suggested opening each chapter with an image of an actual 45 single from rock’s heyday that comments in some way on the topic that follows. “I Only Have Eyes for You” by the Flamingos ushers in the chapter on his daughter’s first glasses, “My Back Pages” by the Byrds ends the collection, and so forth. It turned out to be the book’s signature touch.

“Music was incredibly important to me back then,” Lennertz admits. “I recall sitting down with the Beatles’ White Album and I read those liner notes and looked at those pictures like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Through music, Lennertz formed an instant connection with his daughter. “We went from Sesame Street to Raffi and Disney songs, and then I made a Beach Boys tape for her, and she liked that. Then some Beatles, she liked that. I played some Santana. Rascals; that was good. Then she kind of moved off of that at about 10 to 11, and found her own, and that was Britney Spears. I have no problem with pop music; I went through the Archies and the Cowsills. I get it. So Britney Spears I sort of liked,” he says.

“But my first glimpse of a dark storm cloud was a group called Good Charlotte. Those lyrics are depressing. And I thought, OK. I had the whole debate. Do I want her to listen to this? And I said, you know what? I listened to Procol Harum and Led Zeppelin and I turned out pretty well.” Viewing the publishing process from an author’s point of view was both enlightening and nerve-wracking. Though he’d written more than 500 subtitles during his years as a Random House marketing vice president, he only submitted two for his own book, and both were rejected. He estimates he rewrote more than half of the essays, killed some entirely and substituted new ones under deadline. The five-month wait between final draft and publication proved excruciating.

“There’s that freak-out period where you come to realize that people are going to actually read this. I flipped. I had a meltdown one week when I got my copy of the editing notes because I couldn’t read the symbols. I had this moment of, oh my God, I hate this book! I finally said, Carl, relax. This is a sweet little book. Read through it, change what you can, and let it go.” Upbeat and life-affirming, Cursed contains no reference to either the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, the single biggest traumas of each generation. “I didn’t want to preach and I didn’t want to go on at length,” Lennertz says. “I had a mental list of things not to write about.” In the end, writing Cursed bore out the truth of the famous Nietzsche quote, “Child is father to the man.” (“That’s also the title of the first Blood, Sweat and Tears album,” Lennertz quickly notes, “one of the great albums of all time.”) “I was kind of doing a report card on myself as a father, as well as passing along what little knowledge I had. We’re an overly introspective generation, I think to a fault. All along, I was thinking, how have I done, how have I done? I guess I kind of wrote it to say, hey, you’re far from perfect but you did OK, and at least you’re listening. In the end, I ended up learning from her.” Writer Jay MacDonald is still enjoying his happy childhood.

Augusten Burroughs didn’t set out to become the new bad boy of American letters when he careened onto the bestseller lists two years ago with Running with Scissors, his hilarious, horrifying account of the world’s worst childhood: it just happened, like much of his highly unconventional life to date. Abandoned by his dysfunctional parents to the "care" of his mother’s lunatic shrink, his Valium-gobbling patients and the pedophile next door, Burroughs left formal education in the fourth grade, overcame childhood sexual abuse, earned his GED at 17 ("It was like, Spell cat,’ " he recalls) and by 19 was a New York advertising writer responsible for $200 million accounts. Unusual events seem to form a static-like cling to Burroughs, leaving him to process them the best way he knows how by writing about them.

There are dark passages indeed to Burroughs’ modern-day Horatio Alger tale as depicted in Running and its 12-step sequel, Dry. America may not have been quite prepared for his depiction of addiction, obsession, AIDS and graphic gay sex, but we soldier through the grim stuff for the same reason Burroughs did: in the belief that love and happiness lie just around the next ordeal. He has earned his place alongside such singular dysfunctional hall of famers as Oscar Levant (The Memoirs of an Amnesiac), Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes) and Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries).

So it came as a relief to hear Burroughs’ upbeat tone as he spoke by cell phone from the newly paved driveway of the home he and Dennis, his partner of five years, are building in Amherst, Massachusetts, a few blocks from his brother and not far from the unsettling sites of Running with Scissors. It’s the very Beaver Cleaver moment that the articulate, engaging Burroughs has been dreaming about most of his life.

"I never had a home, never had a home with a washer and dryer, so this is a first," he says. "These are the days when I’m finding myself in grocery stores, which is something I never did, and that kind of thing fascinates me. I can’t tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it’s something I never felt a part of. I’ve always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere."

Burroughs’ new beginning is evident throughout Magical Thinking: True Stories, his first collection of funny, edgy essays drawn from a life way less than ordinary. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been cast in elementary school for a Tang commercial only to be left on the cutting-room floor, drowned a rat in your bathtub, had the roof of your mouth splayed open by a dentist on a routine visit, or had a gay fling with an undertaker in the same viewing room where Rose Kennedy’s wake took place.

What keeps us laughing and turning the pages even as we shudder at the thought of these experiences is Burroughs’ unflagging humor, relentless optimism and endearingly self-deprecating style. Witness his response when a particularly odiferous street person shows up at a book signing:

"But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I’m shaped like a tube. Plus, I’m an alcoholic, a survivor’ of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne."

At 40, Burroughs is free of the stampeding alcoholism that threatened to trample him (see Dry), unchained from the lucrative but unfulfilling world of advertising and involved in a relationship that evens out his eccentricities. His last bout with substances was muscle-enhancing steroids, chronicled here in a chapter called "Roid Rage," that ended with a herniated disc from weightlifting. The fact that he only chews a half a box of nicotine gum a day is almost quaint, considering.

Burroughs says he understands how readers might get the wrong idea about him.

"When people meet me, many times they’re very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I’m not," he says. "I’m like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I’m very conservative and boring in a lot of ways." OK, so your accountant doesn’t regale you with tales of gay sex. But Burroughs maintains he’s not out to shock anybody; he merely presents the details of his admittedly unusual experiences to underscore the universal themes of his writing.

"I think people tend to see the bigger point, which is maybe not fitting in and feeling like you didn’t have the childhood that you expected you would have, or that you felt lonely or struggled with drugs and alcohol or just that you were able to achieve your dreams. These are the themes that I personally struggled with."

There is a sense of completion about Magical Thinking (the title is a psychological term for the belief that one exerts more influence over events than one actually has), a sweeping-up that suggests the author may be ready to move beyond his fractured past. Early next year, shooting begins on the film version of Running with Scissors, with Julianne Moore as Burroughs’ mother and Jill Clayburgh as the psychiatrist’s wife. But for Burroughs, his imperfect past will always be, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a renewable thing."

"I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes. As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that’s just not what happened. But I ended up having the ability to appreciate this strangeness I found, an ability to use it for something better."

Jay MacDonald urges all families to keep the "fun" in dysfunctional.

Ernestine Bradley is the wife of Bill Bradley, the former basketball star, U.S. senator from New Jersey and 2000 presidential aspirant. But she dwells neither on sports nor politics in The Way Home: A German Childhood, An American Life, her engaging account of growing up in wartime Germany and then flowering as an adult in America. Although her marriage to Bradley clearly put her in the company of the glamorous and mighty, she doesn’t gossip or drop names. Her focus, instead, is on coming to terms with her parents particularly her self-involved mother and finding her own way in a culture she first glimpsed through its conquering army.

Bradley came to America in 1957, when she was 21 years old and working as a stewardess for Pan American airlines. The following year, she married an American doctor and moved to Atlanta. There she gave birth to her first child, earned a doctorate in comparative literature and began her long career as a college teacher. After the marriage ended, she moved to New York, leaving her child in the custody of her former husband. In 1974, she married Bradley, who would go on to serve 18 years in the Senate. While he lived in Washington (and eventually took care of their young daughter), she continued to teach in New Jersey. Such an arrangement, she observes, was perfectly congruent with the then-prevailing feminist values to which she enthusiastically subscribed.

Speaking to BookPage from her home in New Jersey, Bradley explains why her book concentrates more on what was going on inside her mind than the minute details of what was happening around her. “I think the world always needs some interpretation,” she says, her German accent still distinct. “Otherwise we face it blindly. Without a structure, you can’t process whatever information there is.” Although she says she made some good friends in Washington during her husband’s tenure in the Senate, Bradley admits she was not drawn to the town’s social scene or political intrigues. “So many of the people you meet in Washington, particularly among the political participants, you don’t really develop friendships with. They are all purpose-based contacts, I would say.” Fully half the book is devoted to the author’s life in Germany. Her descriptions of Passau and Ingolstadt, the towns in which she grew up, are vivid and often warm, despite the deprivations she suffered. Always at the center of her recollections is her domineering mother, who was simultaneously an inspiration and a burden. Ernestine was conceived out of wedlock, but by the time she was born, her mother had made a marriage of convenience. That marriage ended eight years later when Ernestine’s real father, a German soldier, came back into the picture. It was not until her mother’s death in 2001 that Bradley seemed able to resolve their complex relationship.

“When I was a teenager the time that she influenced me most profoundly,” Bradley reflects, “I wasn’t really aware that I was being influenced heavily influenced by her. I could only read my responses . . . . [M]y actions were to get away from Ingolstadt as soon as I could. Today, in this country, [that’s] not a big deal. But at the time, which was in the late ’50s in Germany, it was a major step. I don’t know in retrospect whether it was a step of liberation or just a step to get away from this very powerful influence.” But leaving home didn’t end her mother’s influence, Bradley concedes. “I think after I came to this country, I still enacted the imprints I had received before I left. As she began to fail [physically] and I went to Germany right after the [2000] election frequently to be with her some of my thoughts began to be clearer to me. I began to understand why I had to leave, why I wanted to leave and what the cost would have been if I had stayed. Like any mother, she only wanted the best [for her children] but she always thought her way was the best.” In 1992, Bradley discovered she had breast cancer. In fighting the disease, she lost a breast. But the experience made her more resilient and philosophical. “Losing a breast is not so great an inconvenience as losing an arm or a foot,” she writes. “I am lucky.” Now retired from the faculty of Montclair State College, Bradley teaches one course a semester at the New School in New York and spends a lot more time with her husband, daughters and grandchildren. “My life,” she says with evident satisfaction, “is completely filled.” Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

On the screen, Gene Wilder is known for his comic teamings with Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor. Away from the public glare, the man with the melancholy gaze and trademark frizzy hair paints watercolors and lives in a Colonial-era house in Connecticut with his fourth wife, Karen.

How this came to be is the result of the twists, turns and ironies of his life, as detailed in his new memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art. Unfolding chronologically, in a series of vignettes, it co-stars family members, famous names, women he has loved, including his late wife Gilda Radner, and his therapist. "Writing the book was, in itself, a kind of therapy. Several years ago, a brief trip to California became a months-long visit [when his mother-in-law took ill]. I thought I'd go crazy if I didn't have something artistic to do. . . . I started writing, and whatever had built up, after, oh, Gilda, then finding my wife, Karen, and then memories from childhood . . . it just started pouring out," Wilder recalls.

No, he didn't have a ghostwriter. Speaking by phone from his home in Connecticut, he reminds us, in his soft-spoken, carefully modulated voice, that he has written "more than a half-dozen movies." No fan of tell-alls, the introspective Wilder takes his readers through his life's journey via his work, exploring the notion of fate, and how the choices we make reverberate. Consider this scenario: after auditioning six times for Jerome Robbins, Wilder was cast in the 1962 theatrical production of the Bertolt Brecht play, Mother Courage. Though he went on to realize he'd been terribly miscast, he became friendly with co-star Anne Bancroft, whose boyfriend was Mel Brooks, who told Wilder about a script he was writing which would include a role for him. Three years later, when Wilder was on Broadway, Brooks reappeared in his life to report that the deal for the film, The Producers, was at last cinched.

"Oh, my God. If it hadn't been for Mel!" says Wilder, whose performance of nebbish producer Leo Bloom led to a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He went on to star in Brooks' nutzoid Western, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. He wouldn't have met Radner had director Sidney Poitier not suggested her as the leading lady in Stir Crazy. Wilder soon discovered that the "Saturday Night Live" star was as troubled as she was talented. "I said, at one point, we can't live together. And that's a fact," he admits. Indeed, he adds and writes, were it not for an episode involving Radner's Yorkshire Terrier, Sparkle, they might not have married at all.

Readers may find it surprising that Wilder doesn't romanticize his marriage to Radner. "Oh, you noticed, did you?" he deadpans. He depicts her as demanding, anxious to be loved, a fount of neuroses. But he also stuck by her during her bout with ovarian cancer. "I always thought she'd pull through," he recalls. After Radner's death in 1989, Wilder became the patient, successfully battling non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

He was halfway through writing his book when he realized "I was really writing a love story." But thinking back, he could never have anticipated this particular romance. It began with the movie, See No Evil, Hear No Evil. To prepare for his role, Wilder met with speech pathologist Karen Webb. Following Radner's death, the two reconnected and married. "But if I'd met Karen 20 years [earlier], it would never have worked. I wasn't ready for her and she wasn't ready for me."

In his book's preface, Wilder refers to the famed fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in New York City. To get past it, do you walk to the left or to the right? "I believe that whichever choice you make could change your life," he writes. In Kiss Me Like a Stranger, Wilder offers an unconventional but honest look back at where his own fateful choices have led.

Biographer Pat H. Broeske has covered Hollywood for several newspapers and magazines.