For Connie May Fowler, stories are medicine. There is might and magic in them. "Speak or write the words down, and the world becomes a clearer place. Sometimes it even changes the world," the author says.

Mattie, the narrator of Fowler's fourth novel Remembering Blue, feels the power of the stories as strongly as her creator does. "That act of memory and telling the story is something that Mattie is absolutely compelled to do. It's a life-saving act for her," says Fowler.

Mattie, 25, wants to tell the story of Nick Blue, her husband, a shrimper who loved the sea and who has vanished. But in speaking of him, she must also tell her own story, of the shy, broken creature she was before they met and how his love helped her grow and blossom. The themes of love and loss are timeless, and Fowler makes them even more resonantly so by setting her story away from modern distractions, in the present, but on an island off the coast of north Florida.

Cut off from the mainland, life on the island with Nick puts Mattie in touch with herself and with what's elemental in the world. "On my last few trips into Tallahassee I was lost. I mean, lost in my heart," says Mattie. "Cities don't make sense to me anymore. Yes, I was once a city girl. But now I am wild. I'm salvia and sea oat."

The island, Lethe, takes its name from the spring of forgetfulness in Greek mythology that the dead would drink from in order to live again. On Lethe, taken in by Nick and the boisterous Blue family, Mattie forgets her past unhappiness and learns to forgive. Fowler, whose previous novel Before Women Had Wings won the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award, makes myth a palpable force in Remembering Blue. As Nick explains to Mattie, there's a legend in his family that "'some of us . . . used to be dolphins. And if we're dolphins, we're free, see? But when we're men, we're not.'" Mattie gently explains, "'myths are just stories we create to make our pain go away,'" but Nick believes in the story's power.

In a way, so does Fowler. The "quiet magic" of Nick and Mattie's world is drawn from model as well as from myth. While walking along the beach near her home, Fowler spotted a dolphin close to shore. It kept pace with her as she walked up and down the sand. On impulse, she called to it. "It nearly came out of the water, shot like a torpedo . . . It was so astonishing, maybe for all of us. That started the mythology part for me, creating someone who had a connection with another species."

Readers may not recognize the part of Florida Fowler writes about in Remembering Blue. It isn't the south, though it's very close to Georgia. It's not the tropics, though it's in the same state as Key West and Miami Beach. Lethe, with its "shell-scattered shorelines building and receding in response to storms not yet spawned. Infinite vistas of open water that at high noon cannot be looked upon because of the blinding glint of the sun. . . ." is fictitious, even mythical, but Fowler's rich descriptions of it are real. She lives outside Tallahassee in north Florida and is passionate about that connection with place.

"I kind of fell in love with the people and landscape and water in this part of Florida. I wanted a story where I had a character immersed in that, but also needed a character who was new to it, who could learn about it through others."

Fowler depicts the unspoiled beauty not just of the region, but of the people who live there. To make Mattie's experience authentic, she spoke to local shrimpers' wives. "They love their life and love where they live. They really wanted me to do it right. They opened up their world to me. They took me in, they didn't withhold anything. They were so giving."

Fowler responds to such generosity of spirit because she didn't get a lot of it as a child. She grew up knowing abuse, poverty, and neglect, but like Mattie, the daughter of "a withholding woman" and a "booze hound" father, Fowler shrugs off self-pity. She transmutes her pain into stories, and did it so movingly in Before Women Had Wings that Oprah Winfrey made it into a film. Fowler herself wrote the screenplay.

It was like a Cinderella moment for her, and "I didn't want that moment to go by without doing something to help other people." She created the Connie May Fowler Women With Wings Foundation, which serves battered women in Florida and gives them safe places to go to, like Tallahassee's Refuge House.

"If my mom had had a Refuge House in her life, things would have been drastically different for all of us," Fowler said. "I became really committed to raising funds so the women and children in this area could be taken care of in grace and safety."

Appearing on "Oprah" has given Fowler more readers, but has also made her popular in a way she can't fathom. "People are all the time calling me, asking me how to get on her show. Once you're on TV, people think you're somebody, which is the oddest thing. Once you buy into that, then you're in a lot of trouble."

Celebrity for its own sake doesn't appeal to Fowler at all. She believes people want to be on TV talk shows because they crave a forum for telling their stories. "They just want to share their stories and hear someone say, I understand," she says. "It goes back to Remembering Blue — that act of sharing your story is really empowering. I understand very acutely the power of stories and myths, of religion in that context. That's one of the things I deal with — how do we retain any sense of myth, of the fantastic, of transcendence in a technological, postmodern age?"

Life has changed a bit for Diane Johnson since the 1997 publication of her novel Le Divorce, a social comedy about a young American woman in Paris. Le Divorce was a National Book Award finalist and won a California Book Awards gold medal for fiction. Nothing new about that. Johnson's novels have always garnered critical acclaim.

"But nothing ever sold," Johnson says matter-of-factly. "Before Le Divorce, I don't think I had ever sat on an airplane next to somebody who, if they extracted from me the information that I was a novelist, would have read any of my novels. And now they have. They've read Le Divorce. It's just amazing to me."

"Before Le Divorce, I don't think I had ever sat on an airplane next to somebody who would have read any of my novels. And now they have."

Because of her husband's work, Johnson is also spending even more time in Paris than at her home in San Francisco. "It's easier to write in Paris," Johnson says. "My setup is a little better. I have a study, and some other amenities that I don't have in San Francisco. And, of course, in Paris I don't have to drive, which is like getting three extra hours of life a day." It's hard to know exactly what influence these happy alterations in her life have had on Johnson's newest novel, Le Mariage. A new confidence perhaps? An expansiveness of spirit? A certain boldness in plotting? Whatever the explanation, Le Mariage is much shapelier, more textured, and even funnier than Le Divorce.

Very broadly speaking, Le Mariage concerns two marriages: the impending marriage of American journalist Tim Nolinger to Anne-Sophie d'Argel, an antiques dealer in Paris's flea market and the daughter of the famous French novelist Estelle d'Argel; and the fraying marriage of Clara Holly, the beautiful, American-born former actress, and her husband Serge Cray, the great reclusive film director, who is developing a movie about America's paranoid right wing.

Our story opens with a murder in the Paris flea market and an international search for a purloined medieval manuscript. It moves on to an escalating confrontation between the Crays and the local mayor over traditional hunting rights in France, a confrontation that lands Clara in jail and in the proximity of the handsome French banker, Antoine de Persand (whose brother was murdered in Le Divorce). It ranges to an ice storm in Oregon, where Clara's mother has apparently been kidnapped by members of the lunatic fringe. And it returns to France for a prenuptial confrontation and a marriage. All of which affords Johnson ample room to romp and cavort and dispense an alarming amount of insight and wisdom about marital relations and cultural attitudes.

 "I'm interested generally in the subjects of cultural differences, Americans abroad, and expatriate life," Johnson says. "One thing that is fun for me about living in France is that there are social norms here. They are much harder to perceive in America. But France is a smaller country, it's more stable, it has less social fluidity, so it has social norms. If you are interested in writing comedies of manner, a society where there are manners and norms is a necessary precondition. Hence it plays more into my hands than the more fluid, on-the-road kind of society of the United States."

Johnson is, of course, treading in Henry James territory here. In Le Divorce she makes overt references to James by naming her main character, Isabel Walker, after James's heroine Isabel Archer. "I revere Henry James, but his books always turn out wrong when you think of it. Like in The Ambassadors, which is my favorite of his books, the Americans all go back to their duties in America. In Le Mariage I was playing off that. I looked to French literature—Colette in particular —as a kind of reflex to James. In this case, as Colette would have them do, these characters will go on with their love affairs."

Thus the fictional Clara Holly ponders the words of Colette: "'Vice is bad things done without pleasure.' Does that mean that pleasure is virtuous? She thinks so."

Our ability to find pleasure is one of Diane Johnson's many topics in this novel. "I don't want to sound overtly unpatriotic, but sometimes I do feel that America has kind of missed the point of daily life. We passionately throw ourselves into food fads, for example, but there is no real, ongoing, deep-seated understanding of food and the goodness of food. Or, for another example, the whole argument about the National Endowment for the Arts embodies the trouble Americans seem to have with the pleasures of culture."

Of course it's never quite as simple as these either/or distinctions in Johnson's fictional world. One of the enduring pleasures of Le Mariage is how frequently—and hilariously—our expectations are upended. When the sophisticated Anne-Sophie winds up in Lake Oswego, Oregon, in an ice storm, for example, she is delighted by all that she sees. She admires the kitschy, overstuffed TualatInn where they are forced to stay, praises the organization of American rush hour traffic, and looks forward to visiting Taco Bell.

This characteristic enthusiasm for American kitsch is curious to Johnson. "I should tell you that I have no imagination at all. I just notice things. And one of the things that I've noticed is that French people are full of praise about things that they certainly wouldn't want in their own country. Las Vegas, for example. They love Las Vegas. And that's very infuriating to this American."

The fervency of Johnson's assertion calls to mind her comic description of Anne-Sophie's novelist mother: "Like most novelists, Estelle d'Argel was a bourgeois with moderate habits and intemperate views on many subjects."

Which returns us to the subject of Johnson's life as a novelist, and the playful delights hidden within the generous architecture of Le Mariage. "Some of my description of Estelle I wrote to make my children laugh," she says. "The part about Anne-Sophie's mother writing really shocking things, for example. My children were quite old before they would even read my books.

"But the part about moderate habits is, I think, true of novelists in general. The nature of being a novelist means you have to spend all this time indoors quietly writing. It takes a certain amount of stamina, so novelists tend to be rather sensible. You just can't be drunk or stoned all the time. That," she says, laughing, "is left to the poets."

Alden Mudge works for the California Council for the Humanities.

With the publication of Liar's Game, his fifth novel, Eric Jerome Dickey is being touted as "one of the original male voices in contemporary African-American fiction." It's a label Dickey seems inclined to ignore.

"I hate to be pigeonholed," Dickey says. Besides, he enjoys the fact that his previous novels have attracted a broad and varied audience. "I get e-mails from people all over," he says, with evident pride. "From Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, whites. Yesterday this girl e-mailed me from Germany, saying she has a hard time getting my books, but when she gets them, she really likes them. She wrote me something like six pages!"

Which is not to say that race—or culture—doesn't matter. Dickey uses a fast-paced, buoyant language that has occasionally given his copy editors conniptions. Liar's Game, for example, has a sense of humor you might associate with Chris Rock and a bluesy tone that comes directly from B.B. King and John Lee Hooker, two of Dickey's favorite musicians. His characters live in Los Angeles neighborhoods and lead lives that certainly wouldn't be portrayed on Beverly Hills, 90210. Or in gangsta rap videos, for that matter.

That sometimes leads to misunderstandings. "You get a lot of non-African-American editors who don't understand the culture or the style," Dickey says reluctantly, when pressed. "I've gotten some secondary edits on things that make me think, They just don't get it. It can be language or dialogue, or someone may say, 'I don't think that character should say that because I find that offensive.' "

It's a charge that Dickey finds particularly galling, because it runs so contrary to what his readers like most in his books. "Someone e-mailed me that she would read mainstream writers who are either too politically correct or who just don't write with that edge that you get when you're being honest. Not that my stories are gritty or filthy, but they just seem more real to these readers. I'm trying to be honest and real."

Dickey is emphatic about this. He says he devotes a considerable amount of energy to knowing a lot more about his characters than appears in the pages of his novels. It takes a lot of work, he says, and sometimes it takes a certain amount of courage.

Oddly enough, Dickey has recently found that courage in the adult novels of writer Judy Blume. Drawn to her books after seeing her criticized for an "offensive" portrayal of black people, he jokes that "it just goes to show that all publicity, good or bad, is still publicity." More seriously he says, "she was writing about Jewish people living in this area who didn't want to sell their house to black people. This was set in the 1960s, and I thought it was very real. I'm originally from the South. I knew a bunch of African-American women who used to get up early in the morning, go to the other side of town, and clean up. They still do. So the book was real. But an African-American woman wrote that she was offended by this. And I thought, wow!"

Dickey says his reading of Judy Blume also helped him with a critical scene in Liar's Game. "Some of her scenes are pretty explicit," Dickey says, "and I decided that was the way I wanted to write this book. I wanted to be able to write objectively about Vince and Dana getting into a fight. It's not about me or any relationship I've been in. It's not a broad statement about relationships. It's just about where Vince and Dana are at this moment in their lives. They really love each other, but the straws of discontent on both sides of the room are just so heavy that things just snowball."

The result is a masterful scene that gets at the excruciating complexity of Vince and Dana's relationship and helps explain why Dickey is considered one of the best up-and-coming chroniclers of modern-day romance in popular fiction.

Liar's Game concerns the romantic entanglements of L.A.-born Vincent Browne and transplanted New Yorker Dana Smith. The two meet in a Los Angeles nightclub, hit it off, and seem headed for bliss. The problem is, both are hiding pasts they aren't particularly proud of. Of course, what's hidden must be revealed. Or, as Dickey says, laughing, "I never make it easy for my characters."

Told alternately from Vince's and Dana's points of view, Liar's Game avoids the usual clichs and stereotypes and manages to be both humorous and convincing. Dickey populates the novel with a vivid array of secondary characters — Vince's friend Womack and his wife Rosa Lee; Womack's father Harmonica, who has at last achieved a sort of hard-won wisdom about relationships; Vince's ex-wife Malaika and their daughter Kwanza; Dana's friend Gerri, a divorcee who supplements her real estate income by dancing in a strip club; and Vince's neighbors Juanita and Naiomi. These strikingly drawn characters allow Dickey ample room to portray the joys and difficulties of contemporary life, particularly contemporary romance.

Dickey believes his ability to create such strong characters is an outgrowth of his passion for standup comedy and theater. "In comedy you learn to write with flow—segue, setup, and punch line—but in a way that people won't see or notice. And in theater you learn about character. A script is just words on paper. The miracle of it is that you walk into this empty thing, and you bring it to life. You've got to bring something to it, and what you bring is the understanding of the character you get from doing your homework, from understanding the little stuff like speech patterns and the way the character walks, and from understanding the big stuff—your character's motivation."

It still amazes Dickey that he has been able to translate this understanding into a successful writing career. "When I first got to Los Angeles, I was more interested in doing standup comedy and film. I never thought I'd write anything longer than a short story. I never intended to get anything published; that wasn't my objective."

He concludes, "I don't intentionally write a book with an idea of 'the moral to this story is,' because I'm more focused on letting the people in the book live. I just try to do my best. I never know if I've hit the nail on the head, if it's really worked, until I put it out there for people to read. But this is one of those books where I'd like people to walk away thinking, 'I know these people. These are my friends.' "

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

When stuck in traffic, Maeve Binchy doesn't lose her temper, she takes notes. "I watch people. I'll wonder about this woman—I bet she's out for her first date. And that man knows his son is on drugs. I'm never bored by anything," said Binchy. "I'm very interested in the small details of people's lives, I almost have to be dragged away from them."

Binchy has made a career—even two—from exploring the details and dramas of people's lives, first as advice columnist for The Irish Times and now as one of Ireland's best-loved authors. Though she's written both novels and short stories, she prefers the term storyteller. "People think novelists have style. I'm not being apologetic, I don't have any style," she said. "I don't write like Margaret Atwood or Fay Weldon, I don't write like anybody. I write as if I was talking. That has been useful to me. If you just talk away, that's where you're nearest the truth, nearest yourself. I write as if I was telling a story to a friend." 

It's that winning, chatty tone she uses in her new novel, Scarlet Feather, to tell the story of Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather, who start a catering business in affluent Dublin. "In Scarlet Feather, I'm writing about the adrenaline of the workplace," said Binchy from her home in Dalkey, just south of Dublin. "You share an awful lot of somebody you work with. When I worked in a newspaper, it was possible to have a huge, overpowering relationship with the guys I worked with that had nothing to do with sex."

"I don't want heroines who are elegant or wealthy. I want ordinary people."

So though Cathy is married to Neil Mitchell, a driven immigration attorney, and Tom is living with drop-dead gorgeous Marcella Malone, the catering team shares a private—and vivid—world revolving around delicious menus and demanding clients, collapsed cakes and conniving help.

"Caterers usually feed people in a moment of crisis; they see them when they're having a party, a wedding, a christening, a 25th anniversary, everybody's nerves are stretched," said Binchy, who cheerfully confessed she wasn't speaking from first-hand experience. "I'm not a very good cook at all, it's amazing to admit it—it's like saying you're bad in bed or something. But two of my friends were in the catering business, so I knew the background things."

The background things, like struggling to put together a meal for 70 people when you're told only 50 will be there, may not be the stuff of glamour, but glamour interests Binchy not at all. "I don't want heroines who are elegant or wealthy. I want ordinary people," she said. "In my stories, there's no makeover. The heroine does not become beautiful—my God, Miss Smith, you're beautiful when you take off your glasses. You're not changed by any one outer thing, certainly not by one guy swooping in and taking you away."

Cathy's biggest external change is getting a haircut, and it fails to soothe her feelings towards her snob of a mother-in-law or resolve issues Cathy has with her husband. Like Benny in Circle of Friends (1990), Ria in Tara Road (1998) and other beloved Binchy heroines, Cathy pushes forward, even in hard times. "A streak of toughness combined with optimism is a good passport through life," said Binchy. "The winners are the ones who get on with it."

When Binchy's characters aren't winning, they keep their misery to themselves, a lesson Binchy herself learned as a girl. "My father used to say, when people say how are you, it's a greeting not a question." She admits this puts her at odds with the current Irish literary trend of Frank McCourt and Nuala O'Faolain, whose memoirs bring to light their dire childhoods.

"Poor Nuala and Frank. I was lucky, I had a hugely happy childhood—no Irish person seems to have had that," Binchy laughed. "I was the eldest child of two nice people who loved each other and told me I was the nicest girl in the world. It made me happy and confident. When my sisters came along, I had to share being the best girl in the world, and that was the best gift, the sense we were great. We were sure of an audience of five, we all listened to who my mother met when she went out, what my father did in the law courts all day, the dramas, old farmers fighting with each other. My life was full of stories."

Hearing stories about everyday others made Binchy, 60, eager to tell stories herself. She just wasn't sure at first if she'd have much of an audience. "When I wrote my first book in 1982 [Light A Penny Candle], hand on my heart, I thought only Irish people would read it. I didn't think anyone else would be interested in the problems of people in dull, wet places."

Since then, her works have been translated into many languages, giving Binchy readers galore. Still, she wasn't expecting Oprah Winfrey to call, telling her Tara Road had been selected for Oprah's Book Club. "At first I thought it was one of my friends making fun of me. I said, oh, yeah, who is this really? But she said, this is Oprah, and I straightened up immediately," said Binchy. "Oprah made me very much more known to American people. I get a great deal more fan mail from America than I used to. It's been a huge pleasure to me."

The 1995 film Circle of Friends also gave Binchy a much wider audience—a happy ending to a process which at first terrified her. "When I saw the script for Circle of Friends, I had to lie down with shock. I thought, there is none of my book left. There seemed no words and no plot at all. But when I saw the movie, I was absolutely delighted."

Binchy starts writing first thing in the morning and works until early afternoon. "I share a study with my very nice husband [Gordon Snell], who's also a writer. We do four minutes' housework in the morning in case someone comes around, but we look at our watches as though we're off to the office," she said. "I'm a very, very disciplined person."

And she always finds material for her stories, just by watching people. "No one's life is ordinary," she said. "We're all the heroes and heroines, with fate or flaws to beat."

Ellen Kanner is a freelance writer in Miami.

Anita Diamant has faith in one thing the connection between women. She explored and celebrated that connection, that powerful bond of sisterhood, in her 1997 novel The Red Tent.

In a world where "women’s friendships are unspoken and undervalued," as Diamant says, her novel came as a gift to women, and women returned the favor. Though The Red Tent came out with virtually no fanfare or reviews, women bought the novel, recommended it and even started Red Tent reading groups. From its dead-in-the-water beginnings, Diamant’s novel began inching up the New York Times bestseller list and has since sold over a million copies.

"You can’t market to reading groups," says the author, speaking from her home in West Newton, Massachusetts. "They’ll pick and choose what they like and that’s a wonderful testament. They liked the book and recommended it to each other in a big way. It’s such a women’s phenomenon, it’s almost entirely women’s experience."

Women’s experience also drives Diamant’s new novel, Good Harbor, which intertwines the stories of two women. Joyce, a writer in her early 40s stuck in a lackluster marriage, buys a vacation home in the Massachusetts beach town of Cape Ann, where she meets Kathleen, 59. The two women discover, as Diamant writes, "an endless supply of things to talk about. Headlines, bathing suits, books, and story by story, themselves."

Like Diamant, who rented a cottage on Cape Ann while she wrote, Kathleen loves Good Harbor, a stretch of beach outside the town with its "straight line between the sea and the sky. . . . [T]he size of it all . . . does put things in perspective," as Kathleen says. Eventually, the bond of sisterhood the women find in each other becomes a good harbor in itself.

While the story of The Red Tent came from the pages of the Bible, the plot of Good Harbor, set in the present, comes from the pages of Diamant’s life and the lives of the women she knows. "The issues of midlife are on my plate and on the plates of most of my friends," she says. The book examines one of the biggest issues when Kathleen is diagnosed with breast cancer.

"Breast cancer is one of the great fears of women of our time. We’re all waiting for it to happen to us," says the author. "Almost every month, I hear of someone I know, a friend of a friend who’s been diagnosed."

Diamant’s portrayal of Kathleen’s bravery, her terror and the awful, debilitating routine of radiation treatment comes not from first-hand experience, but as the result of research and a novelist’s capacity to plumb the human heart. The author spoke to medical experts and listened to the stories of friends who were diagnosed. But to create a real physical sense of what Kathleen goes through, "I went to an oncology clinic. I got on the table. This is not something you want to do," says Diamant. "But it gives you a physical sense of what that’s like, a little of that experience."

Oddly enough, life at the oncology clinic gave her hope. "Most women survive breast cancer. When I started writing, I thought Kathleen was going to die, but breast cancer doesn’t have to be a death sentence — and I liked her too much [to kill her off]," she says.

Although she likes Kathleen, the author identifies more closely with Joyce. "I share some of her sense of humor," a wry attitude covering up the fact that Joyce, at 40, is floundering for direction. The feeling came from Diamant’s own experience. It’s what drove her, after 20 years as a journalist and author of nonfiction, to change gears. "I wanted a new challenge, something I had not done before," Diamant says. As a result, she turned to fiction and created The Red Tent.

Fiction is indeed a challenge, she finds. "It’s more open-ended. I have confidence in my nonfiction — I’ve written six books. I know what that kind of book is shaped like. With novels, you don’t know where they’re going to go. All writing is a process of learning. I learned you have to cut and cut and cut. Big sections were in Good Harbor that died a healthy death, a good death, but it took me a long time to let go."

Diamant spent four years writing Good Harbor, years that would have been hectic even without taking on such a project. During this time, she also wrote How to Be a Jewish Parent, revised her book The New Jewish Wedding and toured extensively for The Red Tent. "I overdid it," admits the author, who hasn’t let Red Tent fever go to her head. "My husband Jim and daughter Emilia rejoice in my success with me, but it’s been a slow, steady change for us, no overnight stardom. It’s been a process rather than an event, and I think that helps a lot."

Diamant is now pondering her next novel. "It’s historical, set in the early 19th century in America," she says. And the protagonists are likely to be women. Diamant doesn’t want to limit herself, though. She learned a lot in writing Good Harbor — about fiction and about herself.

"There’s some of me in every character, even Buddy and Frank [Kathleen and Joyce’s husbands]. The women’s experiences are closest to my life experiences — they’re married with children and I’d like to think I’m as good a friend as both of these women try to be with each other," she says.

One thing she doesn’t share with Joyce and Kathleen is their rudderlessness, the isolation that draws them together in the first place. "Both of them were experiencing a lack of closeness, of friendship in their lives," says Diamant. "I’m lucky. I have a ton of friends. I feel very, very connected."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Maine

Jeanne Ray has redefined life after 60 for herself and her readers. At an age when most people start thinking of retirement, Ray launched a second career writing endearing comedies about the angst-filled love lives of the senior set. "Yes," Ray says, "grandma and grandpa can still kick up their heels and fall in love."

In violet eyeshadow, a silk blouse and delicate jewelry, Ray proves that over 60 is still sexy. In fact, the author attracts a few stares when we meet in the Davis-Kidd bookstore in her hometown of Nashville. When her first novel, Julie & Romeo, debuted to rave reviews, the store was the site of her very first reading and drew a crowd of more than 400. "Surprise is not even a big enough word for it," Ray says of the reaction to Julie & Romeo, which sold some 480,000 copies and was optioned for film by Barbra Streisand. Readers were inspired by the spunky over-60 florists who not only reclaimed romance late in life, but passion as well. Even now, Ray admits to tearing up when delighted fans tell her how much the book meant to them. "It is just so touching and surprising to hear," she says.

This month Ray releases her second book, Step-Ball-Change, and breathes new life into the old married couple misconception. Caroline and John's dream of retirement and travel is always just out of reach; instead, they face everyday catastrophes with hilarious aplomb: their daughter is planning a 1,000-guest wedding, their home's foundation may be collapsing and they still can't find time alone.

"I wanted to show how complicated even a happy family can be that nothing is ever status quo or comfortable."

"One of the things I was trying to show in Step-Ball-Change is that it is possible to have a long, respectable, happy marriage," says Ray, who has found happiness with her third husband. "I wanted to show how complicated even a happy family, a well-adjusted family, if you will, can be that nothing is ever status quo or comfortable."

Ray shook up her own status quo when her writing unexpectedly blossomed into a full-time career. After 45 years as a nurse, the timing seemed right to turn her little joy time activity into a serious pursuit: she was in a secure relationship, the kids were grown, and she had finally found a topic that motivated her. Sharing her writing was frightening, but Ray had a little help from daughter Ann Patchett, who happens to be the author of such acclaimed novels as Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant. Patchett gave lots of constructive criticism and then leaned on Mom to finish the book. "Now we understand each other on a whole new level," says Patchett, who thinks the new book is terrific. "The things we get really excited about and the things we complain about are now the same things."

If Ray gets tired of writing, she might take up tap dancing as a third career. "I always, always, always, wanted to be a dancer," says Ray. "I think I was really living my dancing needs out vicariously with Caroline." The do-gooding heroine of Step-Ball-Change, Caroline is a dance teacher juggling the demands of a family pulling in every direction. The house is crowded with children, her estranged sister and the ever-present construction man, but with a little fancy footwork, Caroline manages to keep the chaos under control.

"I think [Caroline] came from me," laughs Ray a little ruefully. "I'm sure she hasn't made as many mistakes as I have made, and probably did a better job in many ways, but the basis [is] pretty much me." The relationships with her husband, children and sister are essential for Caroline, a mother who has created a cozy nest of family and friends. Without being saccharine, Ray's characters have just enough witty banter that when the table is set, you can't help wishing there was an extra place for you.

Just as Caroline thrives off those basic connections, Ray admits that writing can sometimes be too isolating. "I think that's why I'm a nurse. I didn't work when [Julie & Romeo] came out, and I was miserable," she says. "The family my patients and I had created was very, very important to me."

Now she's back to working one day a week with an internist at the Frist Clinic in Nashville. "Meeting people as a nurse which I've been for 45 years or so is very different than meeting people as a writer," Ray says. "You get more respect as a writer, but people tend to reach out to you more as a nurse."

And what's it like with two writers in the family? Both women say there's no competition or jealousy, but Ray laughs, "[Ann's] friends who are writers tell her, 'Ann, if I were you, I'd break your mother's knees.' . . . We have learned a whole lot about one another. Our relationship has changed throughout all this. We've always been very close, but now, I think I understand a whole lot more about what she does."

Like the grueling demands of promotion, for one thing. A three-week book tour kicks off this month, and the woman who three years ago would never have pictured herself as a public speaker is looking forward to the trip. She'll be back at Davis-Kidd in Nashville on May 28.

Writing has filled a niche for Ray, but she didn't spend her first 60 years being miserable. "I loved what I was doing, had a good time, have no regrets," Ray says. "I think it's sort of perfect that I did what I did the first 60 years of my life and now I get to do something different that's equally as enjoyable. It's like seeing the stage from stage right instead of stage left. You just get a little bit different view of life."

Growing up in a small Appalachian town in Virginia, author Lee Smith describes herself as being a "deeply weird" child. With an incredible passion for books and reading, she devoured novels like The Secret Garden and Heidi and loathed letting go of her favorite characters so much that she wrote new endings to keep the story alive. By age 8, she had written her first novel (Adlai Stevenson and Jane Russell head West and become Mormons) and at age 9, she was selling stories to neighbors for a nickel.

Although she was "a terrible student," she enrolled in Hollins College, a small women's college in Virginia, and the intense writing program proved to be a turning point. "I always felt like I was so weird, and suddenly I was thrown in with these other girls who were just like me! It was like going to heaven," Smith says during a phone call from Maine, where she frequently vacations.

The formative college years propelled Smith into a career as an author (Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History) and provided the real-life adventure behind her new novel, The Last Girls, which tells the story of four women who braved the mighty Mississippi on a raft during college. The book is fiction, but for Smith, the raft trip was real. Surrounded by women who loved books, it's no surprise that after studying Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn in a literature class, one enterprising student declared, "We could do that!" and the trip was on—Smith and 15 of her college gal pals would float down the Mississippi River in the summer of 1966. The girls constructed a 40 x 17 foot "floating porch" made of a wooden platform on oil drums and hired a 73-year-old retired riverboat captain to navigate. The raft took 18 days to travel the 950 miles from Paducah, Kentucky, to New Orleans.

"We would have gotten there sooner, but we had some mishaps, as you can imagine," Smith says, recalling the drenching rainstorms, mosquito bites and even a brush with a hurricane.

The romance of the river they remembered from Twain's fiction dissipated somewhat with the reality of too much work and muddy waters. "You couldn't just jump off and have an idyllic little swim when you wanted," says Smith, "and we got way too much media attention." Greeted and photographed at each stop, Smith describes this as the era of the "last girls," the last of the pre-feminist generation.

Smith always knew she would find a story in her great adventure, but she laughs, "I only had to wait 30 years to see what the meaning of that was for me." It turned out that Twain needed an update. The idea of traveling downriver on a raft and reaching a profound destination "is not a metaphor for any women's lives that I know," Smith says. "Our lives are not that linear. That's more the plot of a boy's book."

Instead, she started thinking about how the past affects the present and how expectations rarely match up with reality. "It's all about the journey rather than the destination for women's lives," she says. "In many ways that can make a much richer journey full of many more events and multiple meanings."

Smith's novel, The Last Girls, explores the twists and turns life took for the friends who traveled the Mississippi River in the '60s as they reunite to cruise the river again, this time on the luxurious Belle of Natchez steamboat. Thirty-five years after the first trip, the women, now in their 50s, will spread the ashes of fellow rafter Baby Ballou, who recently died. Building each character by weaving in and out of their memories, we meet Anna Todd, a famous romance novelist; Courtney Gray, a scrapbook-obsessed socialite; Catherine Wilson, a sculptor in an unhappy marriage; and Harriet Holding, a smart but timid teacher who wonders where her nerve went. The flashbacks are both wistful and brutal as memories of the dramatic, free-spirited Baby Ballou open Harriet's eyes to the possibilities she never dared to explore.

"My husband [writer Hal Crowther] read this book and said, 'You are each one of these people.' There's a lot of me in each [character]," Smith admits, though she claims she's most like the orderly, care-taking Harriet. Maybe that's because she went through her "Baby wannabe" days in college, describing those years as a "breakout period—I just went wild." Even while busting loose, Smith showed her literary side: She and fellow author Annie Dillard performed as go-go dancers in the all-girl rock band the Virginia Woolfs. "Yeah, we were go-go dancers," she says, quickly adding, "but it was much less exciting than it sounds."

Baby Ballou permeates The Last Girls, and she's one of those irresistible characters that leap off the page. Her story is told via poetry, and Smith, who had never written poetry, "just went crazy," writing 50 or 60 poems for the vibrant character and reveling in the "freedom from having to tack everything down so securely" as a novelist. "There was this part of me that was just dying to write poems," she says.

Maybe the river provided the inspiration. She wrote the poems cruising down the Mississippi on a big steamboat similar to the one in The Last Girls. She traveled from Memphis to New Orleans with her husband in tow. "I made him go with me, even though he's claustrophobic and hated the idea of being stuck on a boat."

Smith still keeps in touch with some of the college buddies from her own Mississippi adventure and sent several of them a copy of The Last Girls. She laughs at the idea of organizing her own reunion cruise, though, saying "I don't think so."

True to form, Smith would rather spend a vacation devouring a suitcase full of books. Already "reading around" her next novel—which is set in the Piedmont area of North Carolina in the years right after Civil War—she has a new addiction. "It's like heroin," Smith says, with a drawl you can't resist. "You start reading about the Civil War, which I'd never given a damn about frankly, but it's just fascinating."

Linguistics professor Paul Iverson’s life is turned upside-down when the body of his young wife Lexy is found beneath their backyard apple tree. Did she fall or did she jump? Only Lorelei, family dog and sole witness to the tragedy, knows for sure. And she’s not talking. Yet.

Carolyn Parkhurst’s inventive debut novel, The Dogs of Babel, traces the bereaved widower’s sometimes bizarre, sometimes touching efforts to teach the King’s English to his baffled canine in a desperate attempt to solve the mystery of his wife’s death.

In its theme, plot and occasional, uncomfortably gruesome detail, The Dogs of Babel bears some similarity to last year’s most audacious exploration of grief, The Lovely Bones. One might even call this The Lovely Dog Bones.

"There’s a real issue of getting readers to suspend their belief when your premise is a man who is trying to teach his dog to talk. That might be a hard thing for readers to buy," Parkhurst admits by phone from her home in Washington, D.C. "My hope is that, as you learn more about Paul and what he’s like, it’s believable that he might follow this unlikely course."

Paul has reason to suspect suicide: Lexy apparently cooked a steak for the dog not long before inexplicably climbing the tree. Later, Paul’s bookshelf is rearranged in an apparent rebus from beyond the pale, and Lexy’s voice turns up on a television ad for a psychic hotline, desperately seeking succor.

"The book is narrated by Paul, so everything we learn about Lexy is filtered through his perception of her," Parkhurst explains. "In the beginning, he’s in this state of fresh grief and he so idealizes her that we don’t really get an accurate picture until a little later in the book when we start to see some of the more troubling aspects of her personality and both the good and bad parts of their relationship. It begs the question: How well do we ever know another person, and when that person is gone, how do we piece together what they were really like?"

Paul’s journey is a perilous one. As an academic, he seeks scientific answers, even as his research with Lorelei makes him the biggest joke on campus. More troubling, his quest leads him to a group of nutcases called the Cerberus Society who attempt to make dogs talk by altering their anatomy through grisly amateur surgery.

That grim detour was particularly difficult for Parkhurst, who lost her own dog Chelsea midway through the two-year process of writing of the book.

"The only reason I put it in there is it’s almost the logical extreme of what might happen if you took Paul’s ideas all the way, if you put them in the hands of someone who was truly crazy instead of just off-balance with grief. I hope people don’t get too upset by that," she says.

Lexy’s avocation as a mask maker serves as a leitmotif throughout the tale. On their first date, Lexy drags Paul to a masquerade wedding; later, she develops a morbid fascination with death when she is hired to make masks of the recently deceased. "I collect masks and find them very interesting," Parkhurst admits. "It works well with Paul thinking about Lexy after she’s gone and wondering how much of the time she was wearing a mask and how much of the time she was revealing her true self."

Parkhurst, who holds a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from American University, had written only short stories prior to jumping into the novel. Her own fear of losing loved ones, which sparked the central story, was heightened when she became pregnant with her first child midway into the manuscript.

"I had a lot of fears about becoming a parent, which I think is normal," she recalls. "You start to say, am I really allowed to do this? Am I going to screw up this kid in some way I can’t even imagine yet? I took those feelings and amplified them in Lexy. " Some of the book’s more fruitful ideas came to the author while she was goofing off.

"I actually find procrastination to be a fairly useful tool for me," she chuckles. "For instance, the phone psychic. I was supposed to be writing one day and I wasn’t, I was watching the Game Show Network or something, and there was this ad for a telephone psychic with all these voices on the commercial telling the psychic their problems. And I thought, what if Paul was watching this and out came Lexy’s voice?"

The idea of teaching dogs to talk came from a tongue-in-cheek fictional account of such "pioneering research" that Parkhurst had written years earlier.

"I think every dog owner has wondered, what is my dog thinking? What do they make of what they observe about my life? I wish it were true that we could talk and find out what they’re thinking, but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen," Parkhurst says.

By book’s end, Paul does establish a communication of sorts with Lorelei that allows him to get on with his life. It’s an uplifting ending that draws unmistakable parallels between his feelings for Lexy and the unconditional love of man’s best friend.

"I think Paul’s love for Lexy is a little bit less complicated than Lexy’s love for Paul, in the same way that you feel like a dog’s love for you is uncomplicated; they will love you no matter what. There certainly is an element of that in Paul’s feelings for Lexy, but part of his struggle is coming to terms with all of the parts of her personality. There is great richness that she brought to his life, but there were also some very difficult times that he had with her. He’s trying to figure out how to put it all together."

Jay MacDonald lives and writes in Oxford, Mississippi.

Elisabeth Robinson knew she would eventually write something about her sister not because of the way she died, but because of the way she lived. She could have written a memoir, but it wouldn't have had a comic outlet. She might have written a screenplay, since she has written several others. Yet, that form felt too confining. Instead, Robinson ended up creating a terrific novel, The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters.

"It's somewhat autobiographical in that my sister went through sort of what happens in the book," Robinson says, explaining that her sister died of leukemia in 1998.

"She always had been the idealistic one, and I was always the sort of crabby, cynical one," Robinson says by phone from her New York apartment. "When she was diagnosed, she didn't change, and I was kind of amazed at that. And after she died, I was even haunted by that. How could she possibly think the world is beautiful when such unfair, terrible things happen?"

How, indeed? And how could Robinson write an entertaining novel about a tragic and untimely death? Yet, Hunt Sisters is by turns a touching and hilarious reading experience. The secret lies in its lead character, Olivia Hunt, Robinson's sassy equivalent who tells the whole story through her letters. A screenwriter and producer recently fired by Universal Pictures, Olivia is working on the fourth draft of her own suicide note when the call comes that her 28-year-old sister back in Shawnee Falls, Ohio, has real trouble leukemia.

"All your life you try to imagine what bad news sounds like," Olivia writes in a letter to her childhood friend, Tina, "but when you actually hear bad news, it simply makes no sense; it's like being told the definition of a black hole by a physicist, directions by a local, the evidence of God by a priest." Hoping for the best, Olivia flies home. There, it becomes her job to prop up her mother and father, and try to make up for all the times she was a less than stellar big sister to Madeleine. Simultaneously, Olivia is trying to rekindle a romance with her ex-boyfriend Michael, and to bring to production a long-dormant film version of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Robinson herself once worked on a Don Quixote film project with Robin Williams, but it never got made. "It's one of the most impossible movies to make," she explains. "It's perfect here because the theme of Don Quixote Does courage require a craziness? Is courage a form of delusion? dovetails with Madeleine's optimism and idealism."

Robinson decided to write the novel in letters after her mother sent her some of the family's real-life correspondence she had found in the attic. The author discovered they had an inherent drama because of what was not there. She liked the form, and readers will, too.

Olivia says what we would like to. To the boyfriend: "I've decided I like writing to you precisely because you don't respond. You're like a dog that way. A great listener. Man's best friend."

To her mom: "Read that folder I put together, particularly the stuff I highlighted. And I implore you to get a prescription for Xanax. Don't be anxious about taking anti-anxiety drugs; you won't become an addict."

To Madeleine: "A man of medicine, a healer, should not do his ICU rounds in black Bruno Magli slip-ons, the kind OJ wore when he sliced off his wife's head."

To a former colleague: "I guess you weren't in film school the day they taught that lesson about being nice to everyone just in case one day you fall from your totally undeserved place of power."

Letters telling off doctors, boyfriends and former colleagues amount to wish-fulfillment for Robinson. A screenwriter with credits on such award-winning films as Braveheart and Last Orders, she worked in Hollywood for years, and her send-up of the entertainment business is dead-on.

Robinson's film career began in New York, where she scouted books to make into movies. But her love of writing started even earlier, when she was growing up in the Detroit suburb where her parents still live. "I wrote my first story when I was eight," she says. "I only know that because the teacher mimeographed it and passed it out. It was about a turkey who hid in the closet because it didn't want to get eaten." Robinson wrote stories all through high school, but lost her nerve when she went to Oberlin, instead deciding to study philosophy and economics. After college, she headed for New York. Her big-haired, friendly sister, on the other hand, never left Michigan, married her hometown boyfriend and seemed on her way to living happily ever after when tragedy struck.

For the fictional retelling of her sister's experience, Robinson originally chose the title A Species of Happiness, taken from this quote by Samuel Johnson: "Hope is itself a species of happiness and perhaps the chief happiness this world affords." Robinson says she compared that quote with this one from her sister's cancer literature: "The prognosis for people with this cancer is dismal."

"I wanted to learn," the author says, "how you can feel hope in the face of something like this."

Robinson admits to being nervous about all the favorable advance publicity her book has received, including blurbs in major magazines. "I was just talking to a friend of mine about the movie Lost in Translation," she says. "I saw it before it got all the publicity, and I liked it. But I wonder how much I could have liked it if I had been told ahead of time, 'You're going to like it.'"

Not a bad problem to have. Madeleine would tell her to quit worrying.

Anne Morris is a writer in Austin, Texas.

For romance novelist Jennifer Crusie, inspiration for a new book is as inexplicable as love itself. "I can’t tell you where my ideas come from," says the Ohio resident, whose sharp wit and keen insight into human nature are showcased in such best-selling titles as Fast Women and Faking It. "They just show up." The author of 15 books, Crusie has learned to trust her instincts, knowing better than to dismiss those "aha!" moments, no matter how or where or when they appear. "If something comes knocking at the door," she says, "I let it in."

From lovable, flawed men to a mother who counts every celery stick that passes her lips, colorful characters abound in Crusie’s new novel, Bet Me. In a word, these characters are real. At the story’s center is Min Dobbs, a smart, spirited insurance executive who forever laments her ample body’s swerves and curves. Society’s obsession with thinness is a hot button for Crusie, and one she pushes frequently. "American culture is so soaked with the ideal of feminine beauty being about 40 pounds underweight," Crusie says. "Min is healthy, with a good attitude, but every once in a while she gives into the pressure and begins to think she’s fat."

From the start, Crusie tackles the weight issue with characteristic levity. When Min tries to make chicken marsala without olive oil, the results border on the inedible. Crusie’s message is clear: in cooking, as in romance, there’s no substitute for the real thing. "Cooking and love are very similar," she says, "You invest a lot of time in each, and you get out of it what you put into it." On a deep level, Min’s repeated efforts to render a low-cal version of the rich Italian dish are attempts to deny who she really is—a vibrant, full-bodied woman.

In Bet Me, handsome Calvin Morrisey is not smitten with Min at first sight; he only notices her striking blond and redheaded friends. When he asks her out, the cynic in Min suspects it’s simply to win a wager placed by two of his pals (that’s the "bet" in Bet Me). But as Cal falls in love, he begins to see Min as beautiful. While his transformation may seem like a fantasy to some women, Crusie insists such men really exist, and that finding them isn’t as difficult as pop culture would have us think. "A lot of men may be trained by society to go for the Victoria’s Secret model," says Crusie. "But let’s face it: they don’t marry the Victoria’s Secret model."

Though praised by critics for her wicked wit, Crusie hardly considers herself the queen of quips. "I’ve never deliberately written to be funny—nobody slips on a banana peel in my books," she says. "I think my characters just have a particular kind of sense of humor. They use it the way a lot of people do, to cope with the absurdities of life." When people make a list of things they seek in a partner, a sense of humor is always in the top five, says Crusie. "Instinctively people know that those with an ability to see the humor in a situation are mentally sound; they can roll with the punches."

Frank feedback from longtime friend and critique partner Valerie Taylor helps Crusie keep her own life—and prose—in perspective. "We’ve been working together for so long now, I don’t know if I could write a book without her," she says. Taylor’s assessments can be both brilliant and blunt. "There was a sentence in Bet Me, where Valerie wrote in the margin: ‘Who wrote this, your reptile brain?’ It was really a bad sentence, and I thought: ‘Oh hell, she’s right.’"

Recently, Crusie has also teamed up with her 29-year-old daughter Mollie, a production assistant in the film industry. The two hope to adapt one of Crusie’s books into a screenplay. The business partnership is worlds away from Mollie’s college days, when she’d sit around with her friends, laughing as they read steamy passages from her mother’s books. "Her friends would say, ‘Your mom wrote that . . . that’s so cool!’" remembers Crusie.

Beyond those well-phrased fits of passion, what makes romance novels so popular? It’s the one genre where you are guaranteed to find a woman at the center, says Crusie. "Romance novels are an affirmation, an antidote to all that stuff on TV, where the woman is the assistant D.A., and the story is really about the D.A., who’s a man. Or the woman gets kidnapped and raped and tortured." In those shows, even when a woman is in a position of authority, they still make her a bimbo on the side. "That doesn’t happen in romance. She’s never on the side. She may be a bimbo," says Crusie with a laugh, "but it’s her story."

A self-proclaimed "narrative junkie," Crusie advises aspiring romance writers to read everything they can get their hands on. "Story is so phenomenally interesting," says Crusie, who holds two master’s degrees in English literature and has completed everything but her dissertation in the Ph.D. program at Ohio State. "The first thing you say when you sit down with somebody you haven’t seen in a while is, ‘tell me what’s happening.’ It’s so basic to the human condition." Among Crusie’s favorite writers: Dorothy Parker, Margery Allingham, Georgette Heyer and Terry Pratchett.

Crusie is currently at work on a murder mystery in the spirit of Agatha Christie (she wrote her first master’s thesis on women in mystery fiction), and a ghost story. While her tales may center on specters or suspense, Crusie will always write through the prism of romance. "It’s such an elastic genre, you can put anything into it," she says. And there’s never a shortage of material about the rocky road to love. "Dating is so full of pitfalls," says Crusie. "That’s why it makes such good fiction fodder."

Allison Block writes from La Jolla, California.