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.

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).