Here’s an old-fashioned love story that will make you fan yourself, swoon and maybe even break into a light sweat: how a city girl fell in love with a country boy and changed the course of her life, all because of passion and her weak-kneed reaction to an unexpected relationship.

In the mid-’90s, Ree Drummond was in the process of breaking up with a guy in California when she came home to Oklahoma to regroup. She would apply to law schools in Chicago, find an apartment and take it easy under her parents’ roof before starting the rest of her life. It was a “self-imposed pit stop.”

“I think everyone has a story—I've just found a fun way to tell my story and convey my day-to-day life.”

That was until she saw a Marlboro Man-type character from across the room at a smoky bar, a moment deliciously depicted in her romantic new memoir, The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels—A Love Story.

“He was tall, strong and mysterious, sipping bottled beer and wearing jeans and, I noticed, cowboy boots. And his hair. The stallion’s hair was very short and silvery gray—much too gray for how young his face said he was, but just gray enough to send me through the roof with all sorts of fantasies of Cary Grant in North by Northwest.”

Fast forward 14 years. Drummond married Marlboro Man, became a full-fledged ranch wife in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and had four children. She launched ThePioneerWoman.com in 2006 to share stories with out-of-town friends and family, and nearly five years later the website has inspired a #1 New York Times best-selling cookbook, earned a Bloggie Award for Best Weblog of the Year—twice—and drawn countless fans who look to Drummond for easy-to-follow, cowboy-approved recipes, insights on life in the country and humor. (Ever suffered from armpit stains in the most inconvenient of times? You’ve got a sympathetic sister in PW, as she’s affectionately known on her site.)

During a period of writer’s block in 2007, Drummond decided to entertain her website readers with the story of her courtship with Marlboro Man. That story blossomed into 40-plus online chapters and finally became The Pioneer Woman. The book includes the chapters available on ThePioneerWoman.com, along with an all-new section about the couple’s first year of marriage—what Drummond calls “a dose of reality” that chronicles the period when she was dealing with the divorce of her parents, a rough pregnancy and business troubles on the ranch.

I recently visited Drummond at her family’s ranch in Pawhuska and got a firsthand look at the landscape so present in the book. The feeling of driving down the long, dusty gravel road to Drummond’s property was a bit surreal, since the night before I’d read a scene in which the Pioneer Woman runs her car into a ditch on an early date with Marlboro Man. Luckily, I made it to the ranch in one piece.

Drummond and I got right down to business talking about her “fizzy love story,” as she describes it. It’s officially categorized as a memoir, although PW thinks “memoir has a little bit more of a cerebral, serious meaning—presidents write memoirs.”

Whatever you call it, The Pioneer Woman is perfect reading for Valentine’s Day, whether you’re celebrating a lasting love or still looking for The One. Yes, it is mushy and occasionally sentimental, but I’d venture to say even the most cynical of readers will be charmed by Drummond’s hilarious story of being won over by a cowboy. In just a matter of weeks, she went from having a career and going out on the town in Los Angeles to working cattle and smooching under the stars in rural Oklahoma; from vegetarian to steak lover; from a woman unsatisfied with her romantic relationships to a woman hopelessly in love. It’s a dizzying transition and an adventure, and as PW writes in the introduction, “I hope it reminds you of the reasons you fell in love in the first place. And if you haven’t yet found love, I hope it shows you that love often can come to find you instead . . . probably when you least expect it.”

When I met with Drummond at the ranch’s beautifully restored lodge, it was easy to see how an urbanite could become captivated by such a remote locale. From the sweeping property below the house, to the beauty of the horses in the surrounding pastures and the calm of a still landscape, Drummond’s view made me feel a greater sense of peace and freedom than I’d felt in months of city living.

When I asked if she ever thinks about what life would have been like if she hadn’t moved to the country, Drummond answers without pause: “Yeah, I shudder. I am thoroughly convinced that I am where I was meant to wind up. In the country we really lead an isolated life . . . we’re just together, we’re out here, we’re on the land and in the quiet. It’s not that everyone needs that to maintain some level of peace and contentment, but I needed it. It centered me.” During our conversation, Drummond often comes back to the idea that her choice is not the choice for everybody, but sitting on the couch in the cozy lodge and surrounded by wide-open windows that overlook the ranch, her choice seems to make a lot of sense. That much nature is good for the soul.

In my time on the ranch, PW comes across pretty much exactly as she presents herself on her website—warm and funny with a hint of self-deprecation. She gives me cinnamon rolls for the road (I sampled them before I left Osage County) and frets about the puffiness of her face when she sits for a quick video interview.

After talking with Drummond for an hour, what stands out the most is her insistence that her tale is perfectly normal. “I know this sounds a little funny,” she says, “but I contend that I am not an extraordinary person; there’s nothing extraordinary about me or my story. I think everyone has a story—I’ve just found a fun way to tell my story and convey my day-to-day life.”

In spite of all the heart pounding described in her book, Drummond maintains that she does not live in a romance novel. “I don’t believe that romance conquers all and love conquers all. But the passion—I don’t know—it propels you forward through the tough times.”

There is a tall order of passion in The Pioneer Woman—although as my grandmother would say, the specific bedroom details are “left to the imagination.” (The story is billed as a bodice-ripper, but Drummond quipped to me that “it’s like the first little seam is ripped—that’s about it.”)

“That’s not to say that a 20-year-old marriage or a 40-year-old marriage has to have daily bursts of roses and chocolates and diamonds,” she says, “but I remember through the rough times when we were first married—my parents split, all of the bumps in the road—I really was sustained by this guy. My heart would race when I was around him.” (Surprisingly, Marlboro Man has not read the complete saga of which he is the hero. He read a few installments online, only commenting if his wife got an agricultural fact wrong. “He was like my fact-checker when it came to cattle and horses and that sort of thing,” Drummond says.)

From wardrobe malfunction to prairie fire, from fireworks-worthy kisses to a disaster of a honeymoon, The Pioneer Woman is a fun and sexy romp with a most unexpected setting: a working cattle ranch. This romantic journey is a delight, even though we know from the beginning what the ending will bring (reader, she married him). As you experience the woozy sensation of early love through Drummond’s writing, you’ll wonder why she even thought about packing those bags and heading to Chicago. These days, so does she.

“I was completely in love with him,” the Pioneer Woman recalls. “In retrospect, there was no way that I was going to leave in the throes of what I was feeling.”

Prune, an unpretentious, 30-seat restaurant in New York City’s East Village, drew attention upon its 1999 opening. And so did its chef-owner, Gabrielle Hamilton, who was quickly approached by people suggesting she write a book.

“I remember at the time thinking, oh man, this is so cheap. Everybody gets a book? You open a restaurant and you get a book?” recalls Hamilton, whose essays about the intersection of food and life have appeared in the New York Times, Food + Wine and other publications. The flattery would have convinced others, but Hamilton wasn’t so easily persuaded. “I love books. I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.” And so she said no to every offer of a book contract or agent representation, choosing instead to focus on her restaurant business.

But as Hamilton’s skills developed, both with a pen and with a stove, she thought she could make a greater contribution. The result is Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a riveting memoir that explores her sometimes tumultuous family life and years spent in catering kitchens before opening Prune. The book has drawn ecstatic praise from fellow chefs, including Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali.

Hamilton’s story begins with idyllic childhood family dinners with her French mother, artist father and four siblings at their rural Pennsylvania home. But when Hamilton’s parents divorce, the children’s lives are flipped on end. During one summer, weeks pass when then-13-year-old Hamilton and her brother Simon are literally left alone. That’s when Hamilton steps into a professional kitchen for the first time, trying to make money to support her prematurely adult life. She wanders into a kitchen in her tourist town and is put to work peeling potatoes. “And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start,” Hamilton writes.

"I revere books. To me, they are precious, magic creatures that shouldn’t be like turds in the toilet.”

The ensuing journey takes her down a path seasoned with trials, errors and colorful relationships. Hamilton moves to New York, is in and out of college (it takes her three tries to graduate) and kitchens, often scraping by financially while learning about hard living from her fellow kitchen staff. After years of work in restaurants, catering kitchens and even a summer camp, Hamilton decides to pursue her long-held desire to be a writer. And so, with 30 on the horizon, she leaves her final freelance cooking gig and her girlfriend to head for the Midwest and the University of Michigan’s MFA writing program. It’s not long before she finds herself back in a catering kitchen, and upon her return to New York, Hamilton is seduced by the idea of her own restaurant—and later by an Italian man who pulls her into a green-card marriage, all while charming her with family summers in Puglia, Italy, familial joviality and Italian cooking. The result is a beautifully told tale of a colorful and sometimes spicy life. 

The book’s conversation unfolds at an easy pace, like getting to know a new friend, tale by life-defining tale, and Hamilton’s writing becomes almost electric when she sees a restaurant space that could become her own. Her style mimics both the winding life path she’s traveled and her casual, conversational attitude. “Basically, it’s an invitation. So here, I’m going to start the conversation,” she explains, “and hopefully people will reciprocate.”

The time Hamilton spent crafting the memoir mimicked her story’s more exhilarating moments. As she wrote, she juggled two children under the age of three and a bustling restaurant. Sleep wasn’t a priority, and in the process Hamilton gave up on striving for balance.

“If I keep pursuing it, I feel like I’ve failed constantly. So now I’m resigned to the idea that it is not balance. It’s a binge and purge,” Hamilton explains from Prune’s dining room. “I just have to change my mind about whether that sucks or not.”

Sometimes that meant seeing her children only when they were asleep. On other occasions, she left her restaurant staff to run the kitchen while she spent time with her sons. And when it came time to transform the first draft of Blood, Bones & Butter into the finished product, the restaurant’s office became Hamilton’s refuge.

But she wonders, what’s the alternative? “I have this restaurant that was very popular, I have this book deal, I have these incredible children. What was I going to do, say no to all of that? It sucks that it all happened at the same time, but that’s a high-class set of problems right there,” she says, laughing. “I could die now and feel content.” 

Betty White has been on a roll—a tear, really—for decades. Her show business career has only paused a few times since the late 1940s, when she debuted at the dawn of television with the ad-libbed “Hollywood on Television,” then moved to her own pioneering sitcom “Life with Elizabeth,” which she co-created, co-wrote and produced in the 1950s at the ripe old age of 31.

“I didn’t know any better,” says White, who is now 89. “There wasn’t an alternative—the job was there to be done and you did it. I was so lucky to get in television on the ground floor when it was starting out. I was on five and a half hours a day, six days a week, so it was like going to television college.”

"I have been so blessed. If you ever hear me complain about anything, throw me away!"

While attending “television college,” White hosted classic TV game shows and starred in many award-winning sitcoms including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls.” Last fall she hosted “Saturday Night Live” and now she stars in the cable television hit “Hot in Cleveland.” All the while, White was writing books about her time in Hollywood and her love of animals, beginning with Pet-Love: How Pets Take Care of Us in 1985.

“The bottom line is: I’m the luckiest old broad!” White says by phone from her Hollywood home, her beloved Golden Retriever Ponti on her lap. “I have been so blessed. If you ever hear me complain about anything, throw me away!”

Her new book, If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t), has the scoop on her white-hot career and latest projects, including impressions from the sets of SNL and “Hot in Cleveland” and her work on films like The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and The Lost Valentine with Jennifer Love Hewitt.

White also touches on her childhood, her funny parents and her charmed early days in show business, as well as her present popularity, with anecdotes about the perils of typecasting and fascinating stories from her long performing career. Chapters include Body and Mind (“Somewhere along the line there is a breaking point, where you go from not discussing how old you are to bragging about it.”); Love and Friendship (including being a stepmom and dating when most interesting prospects are “much younger men—maybe only 80”); and Animal Kingdom, with touching but unsentimental stories about the animals she has rescued, loved and lost. The final section, Since You Asked, features White’s spirited ruminations on integrity, aging, keeping your head on your shoulders and remaining relevant in a “tough business.”

“Right now I’m doing ‘Hot in Cleveland’ with the greatest gals in show business,” White says. “We all adore each other! From the word go, we fell in love. I’m having the best best time. But that’s a whole different experience from going home and writing.”

White and husband Allen Ludden (who died in 1981) were good friends with John Steinbeck, and she was inspired by the author’s work ethic, right down to his habit of writing with a dog lying on his feet. She writes all of her books in longhand and finds that a fresh pack of paper is her greatest incentive to write. This funny, gregarious lady can think of nothing better than being alone with her animals, writing.

“It’s such a private thing,” White says. “You work it out in your head and you can work anywhere. All of a sudden, if something hits you that you want to put down on paper—it’s just a lovely experience.”

White wanted to be a park ranger or writer when she grew up and jokes that her first book was written at 14. “I wrote it with a pen dipped in ink, in longhand. It was a wonderful original story,” she deadpans. “A girl on a ranch and her brother was sick. I didn’t know quite how to finish it off. It was 106 pages. Finally I had an idea: It turned out to be a dream. She woke up and her brother was well and everything was fine. I just thought it was genius.”

If You Ask Me is White’s sixth book (her recently reissued book, Here We Go Again: My Life in Television, “is the closest to an autobiography”) and she has another one planned for next summer, a photography book with anecdotes about the animals at the Los Angeles Zoo, where she was zoo commissioner for three years and an active board member for 47 years. The little girl who collected blown-glass animal figures rather than dolls has been a lifelong advocate for animals, also spending 48 years on the board of the Morris Animal Foundation. The organization funds studies into specific health problems of dogs, cats, horses and wildlife, including gorillas in Rwanda.

In the book, White tells about her up-close visits with Koko the signing gorilla at the zoo.

“She’s my baby!” White says. “I had the privilege of visiting with Koko three times. She knows me now—she calls me ‘Lipstick.’ When she sees me she runs her fingers across her lips. She’s so magnificent, I can tell you.

“That’s my love—my animal work,” White says. “I have to stay in show business to pay for all my animal work!”

From her 1950s TV appearances to her recent SNL skits, Betty White has been the very definition of a trooper, throwing herself into making people smile. But this feisty octogenarian refuses to take credit for her incredible likability with audiences across generations.

“Have I got you fooled,” she says. “But I’m not going to talk you out of it.”

It’s a first for both of us—Joe Blair’s first time being interviewed and my first time calling an author at a John Deere assembly plant. (Well, technically in the parking lot, where Blair has retreated to his truck because it’s quieter.)

Blair, a writer and HVAC repairman, is, at the time of our conversation, on a job in Waterloo, Iowa, but has taken a break to discuss his new memoir, By the Iowa Sea. Asked if his co-workers know about his double life, he says, “I certainly don’t brag about it. . . . I’m not ashamed or anything, I just don’t talk about it much.” (Though he did inspire one fellow pipefitter to start journaling.)

Blair is plainspoken, modest about his success and seems genuinely surprised by his publishing deal, which came about after he wrote a “Modern Love” essay for the New York Times. He compiled the book, in part, from his writings over the years, a process he describes as a “frickin’ nightmare.” “There was no arc,” he says. “I had to create one.” The arc he created carries him on an Odyssean journey across tumultuous seas both real and metaphorical.

As a kid, Blair was always drawn to journeys and journeymen. He would contemplate the Easy Rider poster on his wall and entertain fantasies of the open road. As a carefree young man in his early 20s, he set out on his bike, his new bride Deb on the back, never dreaming that the trip would end with them settling in Iowa, starting a family and embarking on the conventional path he’d once eschewed. Fifteen years later, Blair finds himself working as an air-conditioning repairman and spending his free time caring for his old house and four children (including one with special needs), and considering (and ultimately engaging in) marital infidelity. All of these stresses are compounded by the unique challenges of parenting Michael, who has a severe form of autism. Blair feels stuck in place, trapped under the oppressive weight of his many responsibilities. Until, that is, the water rises, bringing with it an awakening that upends life as he knows it.

“Before the flood hit, it felt to me like I had no choice left,” Blair recalls. “I had my own business, we had this house, we had this family. And I remember thinking, this is it. We can’t move, can’t do anything.”

Though the 2008 Iowa flood provides a convenient metaphor for the unraveling of Blair’s marriage and the rebirth that follows, he says it was more than that. “I never really considered the size of that notion until we went through it. And then you realize it’s not just a metaphor, it does change everything. When you’re paddling a canoe through your old neighborhood, over the fence you built, and the whole neighborhood is just roofs and tree limbs, it changes you.”

The flood provides a metaphor for the unraveling of Blair's marriage and the rebirth that follows.

In a sense, the floodwaters loosened him from an inertia that had set in years before. “Until we came to the time of the flood, for instance, I wasn’t equipped to deal with Michael, with my relationship with Michael, on the page because I wasn’t ready to deal with it in real life,” Blair says. “At the time of the flood, I was ready to do it. Just like I was ready to face up to my relationship with my wife. I had to confront many of my deficits, and they expressed themselves in all their glory.”

“Genuine” and “honest” are adjectives often applied to Blair’s narrative voice, and with good reason. There’s a rawness and emotional authenticity to his writing that many have likened to the work of Rick Bragg. Blair, however, isn’t entirely comfortable with this kind of praise. “I have a knee-jerk reaction to the word ‘honesty’ because of going through the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa.” (He attended the workshop for three years in the early ’90s.) “There, ‘honesty’ is a word everyone sneers at.” That said, it’s a quality he strives for in his writing, and he’s found a process for achieving it that works well for him. Each morning, he meets with a longtime writing partner; the two set up their computers, tap away for an hour or more, and then read their work aloud. “When I’ve written something, I don’t think of the writing as good or bad; it’s either closer to the truth or farther away,” Blair says. “And when I veer from the truth, I know it when I read it out loud.”

It’s an intimate act, this kind of sharing, as Blair discovered when he began meeting with fellow writer Pamela Bell. The two eventually had an affair, which he recounts with remarkable candor in the book. “It’s a very personal thing and to do it you have to make sure your heart’s in the right place, and with Pamela, my heart didn’t know where it was, so it was easy to fall into infidelity.”

On how Deb felt about Blair laying bare the most private, painful parts of their marriage, he concedes, “Some versions of the book she hated. She’d say, ‘I hate these people.’ It really made her angry. Every time she read it, it was like getting beaten up, again and again.” The book went through countless revisions as Blair struggled to “get her right.”

Though the memoir deals with many things—the trials of middle age, parenting a disabled child, life in the Midwest, marital hardship—the book is at its heart a combination love story and coming-of-age story. Readers will discover opalescent truths on every page.

At the end of our conversation, Blair shares this insight about his son, Michael: “We can’t fix him and neither can anyone else, so what we need to do is to love him. Just like we need to love our other children and each other. And I think that’s what coming of age is. It’s learning how to love. This life, it’s a beautiful thing. And I think it’s a chance for us to have grace. To be a light in the world rather than a shadow.”

Anna Quindlen has taken on a lot of hot topics as an editorial writer, first at the New York Times and later at Newsweek: war, politics, abortion, religion. And she has tackled some of the most pressing issues of our time in her best-selling novels: domestic violence, feminism, terminal illness. But never has she been more introspective and candid than in her new collection of essays on growing older.

In the sublime Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, Quindlen, 59, clearly is embracing middle age (with just the tiniest bit of help from the dermatologist). From facing an empty nest at home to facing wrinkles in the mirror, she writes incisively about her life now and what she owes to the generations of women who came before her. One of her columns at the Times was called “Life in the 30s,” in which she wrote about being a working mom with three young children. Her new effort could easily be subtitled “Life in the 50s.”

“The title of this book says it all. I find this a really satisfying and ultimately joyful time of my life,” Quindlen says by phone from her brownstone in New York City. But let’s not get too crazy with the “I love middle age” talk—Quindlen is quick to admit she’s not above what she calls her “annual pilgrimage to the Fountain of Botox” to erase the worry lines between her eyes.

“I never colored my hair. I haven’t had any surgery,” she says. “But I guess more than anything else I want to look like I feel and by that I don’t mean young, I mean happy. Just for the record, I love Botox. I do it once a year and I have no qualms about it.”

"The title of this book says it all. I find this a really satisfying and ultimately joyful time of my life."

In one of the most thought-provoking essays in the book, “Mirror, Mirror,” Quindlen delves into our society’s cult of youth and its disproportionate impact on women.

“We don’t really have any idea of how we ought to look anymore, just how we’re told we ought to want to look,” she writes. “Women were once permitted a mourning period for their youthful faces; it was called middle age. Now we don’t even have that. Instead we have the science of embalming disguised as grooming. A lot of plastic surgery is like spray tan. It doesn’t look like a real tan at all. It looks like a tan in an alternate universe in which everyone is orange. It’s a universe in which it seems no one has gray hair, except for me.”

It’s the kind of funny and sharp writing for which Quindlen is known and loved. She isn’t afraid to go below the surface, though. In another essay, Quindlen admits to an uneasy relationship with moderation, which culminated with her quitting drinking when her youngest child was a baby. That she considers herself a recovering alcoholic is a somewhat startling revelation for someone who has put so much of her personal life in print.

“It was a really big chunk that I was not sharing with readers who have gotten used to knowing things about me,” Quindlen admits, adding that it was something she needed to make sure her family was comfortable about sharing. “It is one of the few things I could share with readers that might be helpful. To the extent that people think of recovering alcoholics as deeply flawed, I wanted to communicate that there are many who are just fine.”

She said no major event led her to stop drinking (for the record, her last drink was a Heineken). “It’s just in any face-off with alcohol, I lost,” she says.

Quitting drinking was just one of the ways that motherhood changed Quindlen, and in Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, she does a lot of thinking about the challenges of modern motherhood.

“Compared to some of the mothers I see today, we were remarkably relaxed,” she says. “I do have to say, in defense of young mothers today, we were kind of the test batch—first pancakes on the griddle. We all thought we were going to combine motherhood and work, and did it in a seat-of-the-pants way. We were relaxed to the extent that we didn’t know what we were doing. Suddenly, there’s a right way to find a nanny and there’s a right way to stimulate infants. Here’s how I believe you stimulate infants—you have another child and you lay the baby on the floor and have them watch him! Suddenly we’ve made motherhood a job that’s so overwhelming, it astonishes me that anyone could do it. When women score freedom, they somehow have to pay for it, and right now that is being an über-mom. Not only is this not good for women, it’s not good for kids either. This ‘helicopter mom’ [trend] cripples them.”

In her book, Quindlen pays tribute to the more laid-back parenting style of her own mother (who died of ovarian cancer when Quindlen was 19) and ponders how it influenced her child-rearing.

“I’m keenly aware of maybe something my mother knew, too, which is that a lot of the raw material was there already,” Quindlen says. “For example, my kids are really smart and pretty confident, and a lot of that was already built in. Could I have encouraged that or tamped that down? Probably. But some of what being a good mom meant for me was to get out of the way. Given how naturally inclined I am to micromanage everything, I’d give myself about a B-plus.”

These days, she and husband Gerry Krovatin, an attorney she met in college, have an empty nest (mostly—their three children all live “within, like, a few subway stops”). But Quindlen says not too much has changed.

“We live in a house in New York which nominally is occupied only by Gerry and me,” she says. “However, all three bedrooms are maintained as shrines. Once you do it with one of them you have to do it with all of them. All three of our children live elsewhere in their own places, but it is not uncommon for them to drop in for dinner or for me to come home from errands and find a cereal bowl with an inch of milk in it.”

The kids may have grown and graduated, but Quindlen follows the same writing schedule she had back when she was juggling motherhood and a career. “I still write during school hours,” she says with a laugh. “I’m really a creature of habit. I’m still always a little shocked I don’t have kids to pick up.”

Another habit she can’t—and likely won’t—break is New York. She attended Barnard College, and never left.

“My metabolism and the metabolism of New York City are the same,” she says. “It’s like what they say about the amount of salt in the ocean being the same as amniotic fluid. What drives New York City is the same thing that drives me. The car culture . . . something inside me just shuts down. I grew up in the suburbs, but this is my natural habitat.”

Perhaps the biggest shift for this creature of habit was giving up her role as a leading opinion writer. After two columns at the Times (and one Pulitzer) and nine years writing the popular column “The Last Word” for Newsweek, Quindlen says it was time to hand that role to a new generation.

“I feel that columnists need to leave while they’re sharp. I felt I still was, but it was time,” she explains. “You need a much younger woman to do this. We need more of those younger voices out there. The pundit class in America today is very white and very male and very gray. I want to know what younger people are thinking and talking about.”

Gracious as this may seem, don’t count Quindlen out yet. With this provocative, moving new book, Quindlen proves she may be at the midpoint of life, but she’s at the top of her game.

"I wrote it with some pain and so on, but it was not until after I finished that I thought my God, what have I done? I've just told everything." That's Lewis Nordan speaking, better known as Buddy to his friends and to readers of his just published memoir, Boy with Loaded Gun (the title is a reference to his mail-order acquisition of a gun as a teenager and his fleeting thoughts about shooting his stepfather from ambush). He is addressing the natural unease felt by all fiction writers who delve into autobiography.

Actually, when Nordan turned the manuscript of Boy with Loaded Gun in to his publisher, he called it "a novel about Lewis Nordan." The author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Wolf Whistle and The Sharpshooter Blues, he felt the need to rearrange the names of the people in his life and to make up some of the conversations that took place.

That's because Nordan didn't research his life, not in the sense that he went back and interviewed people from his past. Instead, he relied on memory and applied a novelist's interpretation of the events that shaped his life.

"I was not convinced until the last minute that it should be called a memoir," he says. "It's more of a publishing matter than a writer's matter. When I started, I told them [the publishers] I wanted to write what could be called a novel about Buddy Nordan and that it would be as true as I could make it. But, really, I'm as comfortable with 'autobiographical novel' as a memoir."

Whether you call it an autobiographical novel or a memoir, the result is a finely crafted, deeply moving account of Nordan's upbringing in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and his journey as a literary man, admitted heavy drinker, and self-confessed unfaithful husband, from that tine Delta community to Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, where he now lives and teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburg. 

Although the idea of returning to Mississippi to live has occurred to him from time to time, he says it is not so much an option anumre because of extensive ties in Pittsburgh. "I look longingly at the place at times, but I've found I'm a better Southerner outside the South than in the South. I don't want to be melodramatic, but writing as an expatriate, with a sense of longing and love and mythological memories, took the place of some of the old anger I had about the racial violence. . . . When I left the South, I had felt trapped for so long. I joined the Navy as a means of getting out, and I ended up going back [to the South] to go to college. It is only by being away that I have understood the culture I was rejecting."

"I've found I'm a better Southerner outside the South than in the South."

Long after completeing work on Boy with Loaded Gun, Nordan returned to the Mississippi Delta in August 1999 on assignment for the New York Times to write a nonfiction article about the blues.

"They sent me down the old blues highway, Highway 61, from Memphis to New Orleans," he says. "I was hanging out in blues joints, literally. I put 3,000 miles on the car between Memphis and New Orleans. Lots of back roads and juke joints."

As luck would have it, he received word that a cousin from Minnesota would be visiting Itta Bena during that time. The cousin had not seen the little town since 1957. Together, they revisited their former haunts, looking for old landmarks and forgotten memories. Quickly, they learned that Thomas Wolfe was right about the futility of coming home with the expectation of finding old memories alive and well. "Itta Bena is not the town it once was," says Nordan. "All the stores I knew are falling down." 

Once of the "good" changes that has taken place in the Delta, he says, is its acceptance of the music that originated there. "Blues music was a dirty little secret that we listened to, and now it is an institution," he says. "It should have been at the time. I didn't have the breadth of imagination to understand what a special place [the Delta] was at the time."

As he looks back, it was the blues, as much as anything, that influenced his writing. But wait, there was one other influence that some would argue is as Southern as the blues or Karo pecan pie. "We always hear Southerners say that the rhythm in their language comes from the King James Bible and preaching, but I think mine comes from the blues—and from cheerleaders," he says, laughing. "Those sing-song cheerleader chants. In high school I was on the bench during the football games. I wasn't playing and I was far more interested in the music of their voices than I was in what was going on on the field."

Nordan's concern about how his old Mississippi friends and former lovers would respond to Boy with Loaded Gun is transparent in our conversation. To the best of his knowledge, only one of the people written about in the book received an advance proof, and Nordan is not sure how that happened. Nordan met Dorris and Helga (not their real names) at a laundromat in Pittsburg where he had moved from Arkansas after his divorce from his first wife, Elizabeth. Tragically, shortly after moving there, his son committed suicide.

Dorris and Helga so impressed him (and vice versa) that he gave up his lodgings in the YMCA and moved into their house with them, where he slept on the floor of their unfurnished spare room. Nordan was unemployed at the time and dealing with more demons than should be allowed under the law, so it was a godsend in many respects.

That, of course, is one of the great fears harboured by all writers, that someone who has been written about in a book will read it before it has been placed in more unbiased hands. Nordan need not have worried. To his surprise, Dorris called him up and told him he had read the book. "He aboslutely loved it," Nordan says, the relief still lingering in his voice. "He was very friendly."

James L. Dickerson was bron in Greenwood, Mississippi. He is the author of Goin' Back to Memphis and Dixie's Dirty Secret.

Hoping to repeat last year's Tour de France win, Lance Armstrong is currently in France training for the three-week, 2,300-mile bike ride around the circumference of France. He recently answered questions for BookPage.

BookPage: You have proven you can win races. You have proven you can beat cancer. What is left for you to prove?

Lance Armstrong: First of all, I didn't "beat cancer, I survived it. Nobody beats cancer. It's a very tough, very humbling disease and it doesn't discriminate. You can do everything your doctor tells you, eat all the right foods, and still die from it, while the guy who smokes and doesn't listen to his doctor is somehow spared. I was very, very lucky. As far as what's left for me to prove, there are plenty of things. I'd like to prove I can win the Tour de France again, and be a consistent champion. But I'm just as interested in the more open ended questions. I'd like to prove I can make a real difference with my cancer foundation. And I'd like to prove I'm a good husband and father.

Do you still feel part of the cancer community? Is it more important for you to get on with your life and your racing or to offer encouragement to other cancer patients?

Once you are a part of the cancer community you never leave. It's not a matter of getting on with my life cancer is part of my life and always will be. Why would I walk away from the most important thing that ever happened to me? I really believe that whatever my life is today, I owe to cancer. There's no question in my mind that I wouldn't have won the Tour without the cancer experience, because it made me a tougher and more patient cyclist. I think I'm a better person overall because of it, more thoughtful, more compassionate, more responsible.

When you were diagnosed with cancer, you sold your expensive car and felt a need to simplify your life. Do you still feel that need?

Well, obviously not, since I have a new Porsche on order. The reason I sold my old one was because I didn't have any health insurance, and I thought it would take every dime to pay the medical bills. Since my recovery, I've let myself have some expensive things again. I love acceleration, in any form. The Porsche is just a matter of pure, decadent, self-indulgence.

Do you think your experience with cancer contributed to a closer than usual bond with your own son, Luke?

I just think cancer taught me not to take fatherhood for granted. I really feel like he's a miracle baby. For a while there I wasn't sure I would be able to have a child, because the cancer treatments had left me sterile. We had to use the in-vitro method. So it's hard not to feel he's a real gift. My wife, Kristin, calls us her "two miracle boys.

Since you did not have a father figure in your own life, who are your role models for being a father?

Growing up, I saw more examples of what not to do. For instance, I won't hit my son. How old are kids when they start screwing up, eight? Ten? Old enough to have a conversation. When he messes up, I'm going sit him down and talk about it. As far as good examples, I have a wonderful father-in-law. Also, I have some dear friends who are great examples, for instance my friend and longtime coach, Jim Ochowicz, who taught me a lot about how to win races. But the best example of parenting I ever had was my mother. She was enough.

What traditional elements of fatherhood do you want to instill in your own family? For example is father's day a holiday you want to stress or downplay?

I'm not sure how traditional Luke's early childhood is going to be. For one thing, we travel a lot, so he has to be portable. We take him everywhere. We spend half the year in Austin and half the year in France, and when we're in France I'm away a lot racing, which is hard. The big challenge for me right now is how to spend as much time with him as possible and still train and race. I've already changed in some ways in order to be a traditional father. For the first time in my life, I've turned off the phones. The main thing I want is to be there for him.

In the 1997 film My Best Friend's Wedding, Julia Roberts, her curls tossing and her waistline improbably small, plays a glamorous New York restaurant critic who has chefs and managers quaking in their aprons. She nibbles here, quivers a nostril there and heads off to write reams of prose that have dining dilettantes salivating in absentia. Underscoring her character's connection to food is the fact that many of the movie's key scenes take place during some type of meal.

Roberts' character may not have been directly inspired by Ruth Reichl, but it's impossible to believe that she didn't at least influence the screenwriter's choice of profession. As restaurant critic for The Los Angeles Times and then The New York Times, and now as editor of Gourmet magazine, Reichl's passion, humor, abandon, intelligence, whimsy and vital sense of food as culture have revolutionized a nation raised on Betty Crocker cookbooks and school cafeterias. While not the only "new" food critic of the '80s and '90s, she was among the most imitated and, by dint of her own wild mane and physical presence, the one who put the quietus to the stereotype of the short, fat, freeloading food writer.

"It's a very seductive profession these days," says Reichl, whose 1998 memoir Tender at the Bone was a bestseller. "Tender turns out to be a big hit among pre-teenage girls."

In that case, you have to wonder whether her follow-up, Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table will get past the more PG-minded librarians. This second volume of memoirs, which details her affair, the breakup of her first marriage and her romance with and marriage to her second husband, is both bittersweet and almost hilariously indulgent. For Reichl, all passions are connected. In fact, her sensory reactions are so synesthetic you wonder how she survives.

Consider the way she writes about her affair. At 31, she meets a man she refers to only as the food editor. He's pompous, she thinks, and older; she, in her turn, tries too hard to seem knowledgeable and finds herself waxing fervent about black truffles, champagne vintages and tiny-gauge caviars subjects she knows nothing about.

But when they have dinner at L.A.'s legendary Ma Maison, all pretenses drop away. The beluga caviar was "seductively fruity." There were "baked oysters wrapped in lettuce, sprinkled with caviar and bathed in beurre blanc [and] terrine de foie gras with warm toast. The flavors danced and the soft substances slid down my throat."

The next morning, waking up in his bed, she is momentarily horrified. "What was it that I found so irresistible about this man? I replayed the night in my head the caviar, the oysters, the foie gras, the cigars. It had been like a wonderful dream, all my fantasies made real." Fantasies about "the man from another time, the bon vivant who had unabashedly devoted himself to food."

As it happens, the lover was Colman Andrews, now editor of Saveur magazine, and in a friendly way Reichl's rival, since it was the success of the extravagant, literary and sensual Saveur that convinced the publishers of the increasingly frumpy Gourmet that it needed a bonne vivante of its own. The affair, which hadn't been public knowledge until the book's galleys got around, will undoubtedly be a food trendies' gossip sensation, but it really says more about their mutual sensual attentions, and how we have all benefited from their fearlessness.

"You can't be a good cook if you don't have a generous soul and the impulse to take care of people," says Reichl, whose books are studded with recipes that parallel her experiences. "Look at someone like Alice Waters: no matter how much she's done for someone, she always thinks it's not enough. I only know two good cooks who are stingy in their souls."

Comfort goes on to the harder parts the divorce, the new marriage, the adoption and then loss of a baby whose birth parents successfully reclaimed her as well as the happier stuff, her hiring by the L.A. Times and the birth of her son, Nick. Throughout, she obviously tries to be honest and even-handed.

"I thought writing the second book would be easier, but it was much harder. For one thing, I have an extremely demanding job now, so the work ended up being consigned to the cracks, early and late. But also I was dealing with living people and issues of divorce and love and some very difficult emotions. I think of Tender as a happy book, but there were times when I was crying as I was working on this one."

In Tender at the Bone, Reichl detailed a remarkably bohemian youth and, intriguingly, an ambivalent attitude toward fine food. Her manic-depressive mother was so bad a cook, and so breezily indifferent to bacterial caution, that she inflicted food poisoning on an entire wedding party.

When Comfort Me with Apples picks up the tale in 1978, Reichl and her first husband are living in a San Francisco commune, still half-scavenging for whole-earth foods, and her interest in freelancing stories about food and restaurants is looked upon almost as a betrayal of principle. Her palate wins out, of course, but the principles remain, and in many ways inform the change of Gourmet from an armchair grocery list to a thinking person's kitchen tool.

"The quality of food writing is much better than it was 20 years ago. If you pull out some of the reviews from back then, they're shockingly bad," Reichl says. "It used to be considered almost poor taste to be concerned with food. We were all raised on Diet for a Small Planet, thinking how much more food could be produced from the grain fed to a cow and so on."

"We still eat far more than our share of the world's protein. We're greedy pigs. But I think that will change, too, because as a nation we know so much more about food."

Comfort Me with Apples ends with Nick's birth in the late '80s. As for whether she will write a '90s volume, Reichl says, "Well, not right away. Up until I went to work at The Los Angeles Times, I was freelancing; so I would tape record everything and I had the time to transcribe them all. So I had reams and reams of material, plus I had diaries and packets of letters to go back to. But somehow when I started working in the newsroom I quit keeping journals. It just isn't compatible with a computer. So I'd have to depend more on other people." She laughs. " The next book may have to be fiction."

Eve Zibart is the restaurant critic for The Washington Post's weekend section and author of several books including the forthcoming Ethnic Food Lover's Companion (Menasha Ridge Press).