The commencement of my relationship with Jack was the most typical of stories. I was a young associate at the law firm where he is a partner. He was my boss. We first kissed on a business trip, outside the door of my hotel room, on the third floor of the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, California. The first time we made love was, as I've said before, in his office. I was thirty years old when we first began seeing each other; he was struggling to come to terms with his impending fortieth birthday. I am Jack's red Porsche.

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As everyone by now knows, JT Leroy does not exist. He is a literary hoax. New York magazine outed him three months ago, and Monday the New York Times came through with the rest of the story. The public face of JT Leroy is Savannah Knoop, the sister of Jeffrey Knoop, one of the authors of the fraud, and JT's books and stories were most likely written by Knoop's wife, Laura Albert, singer for their band Thistle, an entity nearly as contrived as JT himself.

Even after I'd decided that JT was not who he claimed, I kept talking to him on the phone. At first when he called he was interested in speaking to my husband, but Michael couldn't stand the guy. After their first interaction -- an aborted interview of Michael by Leroy for the magazine Bomb back when JT was known as "Terminator" -- Michael refused to have anything to do with him. But I let myself be sucked in.

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I can't say that while he was gone I missed him as much as he missed me; after all, I did not prove my devotion by spending our time apart dripping tears onto the sand table and rocking in misery on the cushions of the book nook. I was too busy reveling in my time alone, getting my work done, going for solitary walks, reintroducing myself to my husband. But when Zeke returned I leapt onto the couch with as much eagerness as he did. Holding his fleshy, silky body was the most satisfying tactile experience I have ever had in my life. The flawlessness of an infant's skin is a trite metaphor, but his baby skin was even more buttery than most. And I'm not a child-aggrandizing mother blinded by love. I have four children, and this boy's skin was different. It felt like the freshest heavy cream tastes: smooth and round, fat and thick on the tongue. His body, too, was different. It's a wonder how what can inspire such disgust on an adult can be so delectable on an infant. Zeke is 7 years old now, as thin and wiry as a half-starved whippet, but when I close my eyes, I can still feel the give of his plump baby flesh under my fingers.

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I gorged myself and was sorry there was no trough in which I could imitate the Roman Caesars between courses. I ate so much I had to surreptitiously inch down the zipper of my skirt. I ate so much I was sick for days.

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Not that the other girls in the Juvenile Hall classroom were particularly quiet. There were a few girls so sunk in their misery that they could not even be bothered to lob insults across the aisle. But the loud ones made enough noise for everyone. Still, considering everything, they were remarkably restrained, even respectful of the nervous white lady standing up in front of the class, holding a copy of her book and trying to get them excited about doing some "writing exercises."

Except for that one girl. The only thing that worked with her was lying.

I borrowed an exercise from "What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers," by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter, and told the girls three stories. "Two of these stories are lies," I told them. "One of them is true. My job is to make all three so convincing that you can't tell the difference. Your job is to figure it out."

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"It's OK, I can do it," she said. "I just need some hemp."

Frankly, so did I.

I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day. If my son Zeke's teacher, a delightful and intelligent woman, were to walk through my kitchen door between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. on a weekday, I could not guarantee her safety.

Eight-year-old Zeke routinely has an hour of homework a night. He's an interesting kid, one who's described as having a lot of "personality." He's the kind of kid who, left to his own devices, thinks it's funny to write "a Rottweiler" as the answer to every question on the homework page, even the math problems. Especially the math problems.

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It seems as if every corporation with female customers has realized that pinking it up can be good for business. Take Avon, for example, the fairy godmother of pink events. On its Web site Avon claims that between 1992 and 2004 it donated $350 million for "medical research, access to treatment, screening, support services, and education." Three hundred and fifty million over 12 years is a lot of money, true, but let's remember that we're not talking about an anonymous donation. Avon scores a lot of pink P.R. points for its "breast cancer crusade," and the company's dedication to the cause is good for the bottom line, too. According to Breast Cancer Action, a grass-roots organization in San Francisco, Avon's 4-year-old Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer lipstick line actually drove a 6 percent growth in the sale of its lipstick units.

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A couple of weeks ago, they spent the morning baking brownies and chocolate chip cookies and set up shop as usual. But this time they weren't raising money to buy Manga and Z-cards. The poster they painted read, "Bake Sale for Katrina Relief." They even hauled out the big guns: their very blond, very cute 4-year-old sister. She stood next to the poster and batted her eyelashes.

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That both these are true does not go without saying, not even for my mother, who has always been insured, and who is a public health administrator and thus would rather walk the streets of our hometown stark naked than be uninsured for even a day. It does not go without saying, because my mother is turning 65 in August, and she hopes to retire in the next few years.

My mother has been working steadily for the past 45 years, and she not in the best health. She has high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis, and I know she would like to stop working before ill health prevents her from enjoying the activities -- traveling, gardening -- she has been putting off until retirement.

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The treatment the settlers received from those Jewish soldiers was so thoughtful, so judicious, so tender. The officers in command of the evacuation spent hours negotiating with the settlers, listening to their ravings, before gently escorting them away. And yet, over and over again we heard the settlers analogizing their suffering to the massacre of millions during the Holocaust. Dikla Cohen of the settlement Neve Dekalim said, "I feel that today was a pogrom."

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Now, the correct response to that comment might have been a stern rejoinder to mind her own business. It might even have included a series of expletives. Instead, what I did was burst into tears and launch into a long explanation about how the milk in the bottle was my own, pumped at 4 in the morning while everyone else in the house was asleep. I had in fact been pumping breast milk for Abraham every two hours, I told this stranger, because my son was born with a palate abnormality that made it difficult for him to suck properly from the breast. I had weathered plugged ducts and breast infections; the milk in that very bottle was colored a faint shade of purple, from the gentian violet I'd been applying to treat a brutal case of thrush. To establish my breast-feeding bona fides I even told her how especially traumatizing my failure to feed this baby was, given that I'd successfully nursed three children, one for nearly three years.

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There was nothing traditional about those two. Matthew was as involved a father as I've ever seen. He didn't just change the occasional diaper, he assumed equal responsibility for the care of their daughter. Stacia is a massage therapist, a doula, and while I'm not sure, I'm willing to bet she'd call herself a feminist. Still, when it came to home repair, the division of labor fell along traditional lines. That's the way it is in my marriage, too.

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The game my kids were so agog over wasn't softball, though. It wasn't even foursquare, a game they'd once tried to explain to me without much success. Finally, I asked them what they were talking about.

"Dodgeball!" my 7-year-old son announced, gleefully. "It's really fun."

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While Rosie was hovering over the grimy toilet seat and I was herding her younger brother around the stall, trying to keep him from touching anything (one of my grandmother's most important legacies is the idea that the only part of your body that should touch a public restroom is the soles of your shoes), I caught a last glimpse of the other mother rushing out the exit. She had that swollen, stunned look I remember so well from the first months after each of my children were born, when exhaustion seems far too benign a word to describe the extent of your fatigue, when it seems like every part of your body is leaking and sore, when you have trouble remembering why you wanted a baby to begin with. The only part of her baby that was visible outside of the cotton sling was a tuft of mouse-colored hair. I knew how soft that hair was, delicate filaments of spun sugar. I could remember the sensation of silken baby hair against my lips, of a small, warm skull resting in the palm of my hand, the pulse fluttering under my fingertips.

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Laura is the perfect companion for a kid, and had she and her partner been a decade younger, they probably would have had a few of their own. In their generation, it wasn't as common for lesbian couples to have children together. Instead, Zeke and his older sister have been the lucky recipients of these women's devoted attentions. We met because Laura was our investment advisor, but while it may be trite, it is no exaggeration to say that Laura and Hedy are now part of our family.

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I had begun my blog two months before, imagining that it would act as a journal, a way of taking notes on my life, and at the same time be a sort of marketing tool to remind readers that I still existed in between novels. Almost immediately I discovered in myself a confessional impulse, a compulsive need to haul open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts lurking beneath. I blogged daily, chronicling everything from what my youngest son ate for dinner (one spaghetti noodle, one pat of butter, and all the green, blue and pink frosting off a very large cupcake), to the Supreme Court's dramatic shift on sentencing guidelines, to the various side effects of the medications I take for my bipolar disorder. As soon as I read something interesting, as soon as I heard something moving, as soon as one of my children said something funny, I posted to my blog.

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I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More important, I could feel the baby move. We had seen him on the ultrasound; I have a very clear memory of his two tiny feet, perfect pearl toes, footprint arches, round heels. This was, for me, a baby, not a "clump of cells" as an older woman, steeped in the arcane language of the early feminist movement, called him. He was my baby, and I chose to end his life.

Let me be very clear here. I support absolutely the right to abortion. I give financial support to Planned Parenthood, to NARAL. I am fanatical on this issue. I believe that every woman is entitled to choose when and if to end a pregnancy. I also believe that to end a pregnancy like mine is to kill a fetus. Kill. I use that word very consciously and specifically.

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