James Frey has never been shy about his towering literary ambition. Since he burst onto the scene in 2003 with A Million Little Pieces, the best-selling, highly charged memoir dissecting his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, Frey has ruffled feathers and raised temperatures by saying things like:

"When I decided I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t get into it to be a guy who sold 15 books and got a review in the local paper. I’m in this to be one of the great writers of my time."

What is often left out of the accounts of Frey’s supposed overreaching is what he usually says next: "I don’t say that I am one of the great writers, which I think is an important distinction. But that’s the ambition, for sure. I want to be read in 75 years."

Whether Frey’s new book, My Friend Leonard, will be read in 75 years is, of course, impossible to say. But it will certainly be read – widely read – this year. While somewhat different in tone from Pieces (there is more humor and less rage, for example) My Friend Leonard is just as compelling as the first book, with the same electrifying narrative energy, stylistic daring and atmosphere of emotional risk.

My Friend Leonard takes up about where Pieces left off. Out of recovery, Frey does a stint in jail for a past drug conviction, then sets out to rebuild his life. He is advised and assisted at critical junctures by his friend Leonard, a larger-than-life Las Vegas gangster 30 years his senior whom he met in rehab and who has decided to treat Frey like the son he never had. Leonard helps Frey financially by employing him occasionally as a bagman for some of his enterprises. He guides Frey through the purchase of his first Picasso. He uses a little unfriendly persuasion when Frey’s neighbor seems about to turn murderous after an incident between their dogs. Skeptical readers might wonder if Leonard is a sort of idealized, if hard-bitten, fairy godfather. But Frey says otherwise.

"Did the stuff in the book really happen? Yeah, it did. My girlfriend killed herself the way I wrote it. Leonard helped me the way I said he helped me, died the way he died. The events in the book are the events of my life. But that’s not to say that I didn’t pick and choose what to use and how to use it. The goal was to write a great book, to create something that somebody will feel good about having read. It’s a sort of juggling act, where I have to be true to the events and the people, but where I also know that I am writing a book and that I have to be true to what the book should be," Frey says in a gravelly voice during a telephone interview.

The 35-year-old Frey and his wife, Maya, a creative director at a New York advertising agency, had their first child, a daughter, in December and are in the midst of moving to an apartment "that is a bit more baby-friendly" in New York’s Tribeca district. Frey takes the call at the home of friends, and as he talks, he moves from room to room ahead of his friends’ noisy family life.

"One thing that’s always been important to me is that nobody who has ever been in one of my books has ever had a problem with anything I’ve written," Frey continues. "They’ve never disputed my version of events or felt offended by it, even when I didn’t write about them in a positive way. Which means something."

At the very least it means that Frey is exceptionally good at conveying the emotional truths behind the events he relates. His portrait of his friendship with Leonard is deeply resonant and offers a fuller human portrait of a gangster than you’re likely to find anywhere else.

What is most striking – and most difficult to describe – is Frey’s manner of telling his tale. Here, as in A Million Little Pieces, Frey’s style is raw, visceral and emotionally electric. Frey says that when he set out to be a writer he studied writers like Hemingway, Henry Miller and Baudelaire and noted that each had a voice, a signature style that sounded like no one else’s. He deliberately set out to develop a recognizable style all his own.

"People read my books and think because they flow very easily and very simply that it must just come out that way," Frey says. "It doesn’t. I work very hard and I’m very, very deliberate and methodical in how I work."

In fact, Frey says one of the things that sets him apart from "smarter or more naturally gifted" aspiring writers of his generation is his "ability to sit there for 10 hours and get done what I need to get done, without ever losing confidence that I can do it. And to do that day after day after day after day after day."

So it’s no real surprise to learn that since completing the manuscript of My Friend Leonard, Frey has finished the screenplay for A Million Little Pieces, which will be filmed later this year, and written the script for a TV pilot for Fox. He is currently working on a screenplay for Paramount. Earlier this year, he wrote introductions for British reissues of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

Miller’s bold presentation of his life in his books had a powerful philosophical influence on Frey’s development as a writer, just as his friend Leonard had a powerful influence on his development as a human being. "I’ve learned a lot of things from a lot of people." Frey says. "And they all boil down to similar things: you have to be willing to hurt for what you want. You have to risk, to gain. You have to be willing to feel pain and deal with pain. You have to decide what you want out of life and be willing to pay the consequences if you want to have a great life. It’s worth it. And you’re a sucker if you don’t."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Julia Scheeres’ memoir Jesus Land is a painfully candid account of a family riddled with dysfunction. Scheeres, now 38, grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Lafayette, Indiana, the daughter of a surgeon and his Bible-thumping wife. Her parents’ missionary zeal led them to adopt two African-American boys when Julia was still a toddler. One of them, David, became Julia’s soul mate. Together, the two endured their upbringing and shared many trials, including a harrowing stay at Escuela Caribe, a Christian school in the Dominican Republic run by New Horizons Youth Ministries. Scheeres’ parents appear more interested in their own religiosity than their children’s emotional needs. Her father’s answer to discipline was bone-breaking brutality; meanwhile, her mother turned a blind eye to rampant behavioral problems, including David’s attempted suicide.

Julia’s other adopted brother, Jerome, grew up angry and hostile, and his repeated sexual abuse of Julia was additional torment in their ugly home life. Jesus Land concludes with the news that David, whose personal notebook inspired the memoir, died in a car crash in 1987. He was only 20 years old. Scheeres recently answered questions from BookPage about her wrenching personal story.

BookPage: Your portrait of Escuela Caribe is troubling, since what’s supposed to be a reaffirming place for confused teens comes off as an insensitive reform school. Do you think your parents made a mistake in sending you there? Julia Scheeres: I think it’s a mistake to send any child to Escuela Caribe. For $3,000 a month, you can ship your child to a Christian boot camp in the Dominican Republic, where she’ll receive a substandard education, learn to spout “Praise Jesus,” and be so traumatized she’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of her life. Escuela Caribe is essentially a dumping ground for the problem teens of wealthy evangelicals. Many students come from homes where they were emotionally, physically or sexually harmed, yet these issues aren’t addressed by the school. Such camps are located in foreign countries for good reason: to evade U.S. regulations governing child welfare, academic quality and housing standards. The whole point of Escuela Caribe is to break the “rebellious teenage spirit” through humiliation, intimidation and suspending simple freedoms and convert kids into Christian automatons.

BP: Frank memoirs involving family and abuse can be painful reading for all concerned. What have been the reactions of those involved in your life at that time? JS: My book is first and foremost a tribute to my brother David. I found a green notebook after his funeral in which he detailed what it was like to grow up black in a white, fundamentalist family and about our time together at Escuela Caribe. I wrote Jesus Land in an effort to preserve his memory and the memory of the life we shared together. I was the person who knew him best, and it’s my job to keep telling people about what a quirky, tragic and beautiful soul he was. The reaction of other family members and acquaintances wasn’t a consideration as I wrote Jesus Land.

BP: Of all the people in your book, your father seems the most mysterious. What was, or is now, your relationship with him? JS: My father was a ’50s-era dad, who left childcare to the wife and was largely absent due to his high-pressure work as a surgeon. But he was also pressured to be the Biblical head-of-the household disciplinarian. We didn’t talk about problems or issues in my house. You were told what to do, and you obeyed. If you broke the rules, you got spanked or whipped, in my brothers’ case. I grew up fearing and avoiding my father not a healthy situation. I no longer have contact with either of my parents, who work as full-time volunteers at a missionary compound in Orlando, Florida.

BP: Being the victim of sexual abuse usually holds lingering consequences. What has been the long-term emotional or behavioral fallout for you? JS: Where to begin? A rabid distrust of people, and all men in particular? Sexual frigidity and/or promiscuity? A tendency to depersonalize and/or revile sexual partners? I’m sure it’s all well-documented in the case studies. I think the most important step for me was meeting my husband, a man who blew away my low expectations for male behavior and companionship. I don’t think people ever fully recover from ritual abuse of any sort. I still get into funks, but have learned to better negotiate them.

BP: Despite your troubled youth, you’ve gone on to obtain a master’s degree and respect as a journalist. To what do you ascribe your perseverance? JS: I’ve always had a strong sense of self and an independent streak three miles wide. Growing up, I believed that if I could just escape the pettiness surrounding me, things would get better. And they have.

In the world of showbiz sidekicks, Ed McMahon is royalty—the most famous second banana, ever. Instantly identifiable, the man with the booming laugh and avuncular voice worked with Johnny Carson for more than four decades. The announcer for Carson’s daytime game show, “Who Do You Trust?” McMahon went on to spend 34 years opposite the late-night TV king on “The Tonight Show.” McMahon’s warmly affectionate Here’s Johnny! is his homage to their friendship.

“That was the best time of my life, the best years of my life, being with him,” says McMahon. Not that the famed pitchman is packing it in. To the contrary, McMahon, at 82, seems tireless. Speaking by phone from his Beverly Hills office, on the eve of a New York publicity tour, he relates that he and wife, Pam, are busy raising their niece (whose mother died as a result of a car accident). “We had the sweet 16 party with a hundred kids in the backyard.” With a laugh, he adds, “When you say your prayers tonight, say one for me, because I’m raising a teenager!” (The father of six also has six grandkids.)

McMahon, who penned a 1998 memoir, hopes this latest book will dispel some notions that have surfaced since Carson’s death early this year, especially the oft-heard claim that Carson was ice-water cold and aloof. “He was not cold, he was private. He was wonderful on camera, but once the cameras stopped, he returned to being a private man. Johnny used to say, ‘Ed, I’m great with 10 million, I’m lousy with 10.’” Noting that Carson didn’t intrude, didn’t force himself, McMahon explains, that was a result of his Nebraska-Midwestern ethic.

Along with sharing golden moments from “The Tonight Show,” McMahon gives peeks at those guests who caught some guff. Like the time a performing Ray Charles snapped at the house drummer, “Pick up the pace!” Johnny made him apologize, recalls McMahon. Then there was the off-putting appearance of comedian Charles Grodin. “It went a little too far because it left the audience out. Johnny was always very concerned about the audience,” McMahon says. “He didn’t want anything to be beyond their comprehension.”

A man who feels comfortable in a crowd, McMahon is a former carnival barker and boardwalk pitchman (he hawked the Morris Metric Slicer) who once went door-to-door selling pots and pans. At 17, he was working in radio and on early TV, as well as calling bingo games. World War II led to a stint in the skies as a Marine Corps aviator. Returning home to TV, McMahon was involved in 13 Philadelphia shows in a single year. That included hosting a late-night movie and playing a clown on a Saturday morning kiddie program. Then came a repeat of military life: he was recalled to service for the Korean War.

It was through a producer for popular Philly TV host Dick Clark that McMahon’s name surfaced as a possible announcer for Carson’s game show. McMahon took the train to New York, met with Carson, then headed back home. He wasn’t hopeful about the prospects; the meeting had lasted all of six minutes. When the show’s producer called, saying Carson wanted McMahon to wear suits, McMahon wondered what he was talking about. “Oh . . . didn’t they tell you? You got the job. You start next Monday.” And so began one of TV’s most durable partnerships.

Over the years, they shared drinks at Sardi’s, survived marriages and divorces (McMahon lucked out at number three) and endured painful losses. In 1995, when McMahon’s son died of stomach cancer, Carson called to express condolences, adding, “There’s not a day when you won’t think about him.” He was speaking from the heart: Carson’s photographer-son, Rick, had died in a 1991 car crash. (Carson famously wrapped one of his shows by airing his son’s photos.) As for what set Johnny apart from the rest of the chat pack, McMahon says, simply, “Class. He had class.” Not a big fan of some of today’s talk show hosts, and their sharp and piercing comedy, McMahon notes, “Johnny very seldom penetrated. It was always like a powder-puff. He still got the laughs, but he didn’t hurt.”

Audiences also related to Carson’s wide-eyed charm, as well as the easy-going camaraderie with McMahon, who says of their astounding adventure, “I always liken it to two kids, kicking a can down the street. We had a good time together, and it showed.”

Biographer Pat H. Broeske spends her late nights watching Jimmy Kimmel.

Poet, novelist, essayist and contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered, Andrei Codrescu is both prolific and celebrated. A professor of English at Louisiana State University, he is also the editor of the literary journal Exquisite Corpse. Romanian by birth, Codrescu has lived in and around New Orleans for more than 20 years, and his latest book, New Orleans, Mon Amour, is a collection of essays detailing his decades-long love affair with the city. The volume is particularly meaningful in light of the city’s devastation, and a percentage of the book’s proceeds will be donated to hurricane relief. Codrescu recently answered questions from BookPage about his adopted hometown and its uneasy future.

BookPage: Did this book grow out of the recent events in New Orleans or was it one you had in the back of your mind? Did you feel compelled to write it? Andrei Codrescu: I’ve been writing about New Orleans for 20 years, but it never occurred to me that the city I knew, loved and criticized, would one day cease to exist. I had no idea that I might one day not take it for granted that the character, poignancy and peculiarities of New Orleans would be unavailable to my blithe pen. After Katrina, my writings suddenly had a shape, sadly, the shape of history.

BP: In the book, you describe just how many writers live and work in New Orleans. What has been happening in that community since the hurricane? AC: Well, some of them took refuge in my Baton Rouge house. James Nolan, Jose Torres-Tama, Claudia Copeland, Jed Horne escaped from New Orleans in various dramatic ways and came to Baton Rouge. There was camaraderie, and Jimmy Nolan, a true New Orleanian, cooked five-star meals. That’s a constant of the New Orleans character: protect civilization and keep your exquisite manners even as the ship goes down. Catastrophes happen suddenly, but manners and cuisine are acquired over time, they are about permanence. Many other New Orleans writers were scattered all over the U.S., to places where they imported our story-telling, joie-de-vivre, and, possibly, drove their hosts insane with some of the local bad habits (like the occasional cigarette and the story-lubricating rum). Right now, the hardiest souls are returning: there are regular poetry readings at the Gold Mine Saloon in the French Quarter, bookstores are re-opening, books about New Orleans are feverishly written and re-issued. Every writer I know is possessed by fury and inspiration. Sadly, this time is going to be known as a golden age for New Orleans letters. I want to collect every book and scrap of paper being published now; it will all be extremely valuable to our successors. Catastrophes are always great sources of inspiration for artists because they provide seriousness, gravitas, plus endless stories.

BP: You say charm can never be used exactly the way it’s found. With that in mind, do you worry about the future of New Orleans, especially its rebuilding? AC: I worry about corporate entities like casinos and entertainment conglomerates bottling fake charm and faux-history to create a bigger tourist trap than we can imagine now. A guy in California actually wants to recreate Storyville, an ancient prostitution district without prostitutes. Now, how exactly do you do that? The charm of New Orleans was that it was never virtual, it was always a hands-on experience.

BP: You were born about as far away from the American South as one can get, and yet you have articulated exactly the feel, nature and attitude of the region and of course, of New Orleans specifically. Do you have any thoughts on how this is? AC: When I first moved to Louisiana, people asked me where I was from. When I said, Transylvania, there was a sigh of relief. At least you’re not a Yankee. I was born in Sibiu, a small town in Transylvania, Romania, that was remote and provincial, but full of magic. I knew liars, storytellers and vagabonds where I grew up. I found them again in New Orleans. The politics of Louisiana was corrupt, just like home. Everyone knew what a cop or a judge cost. When the casinos came, the scale changed. The city started on the path that I fear Katrina hastened greatly. About a decade ago, all of Transylvania moved to New Orleans thanks to Anne Rice’s vampires and the city’s Goths, which proves that you don’t need to go home again; if you’re patient, your home will come to you, fangs and all.

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."