I endeavored to move on with my life. A month after I left Jerry Salinger's house, with the money I'd earned from the sale of Looking Back, I bought a farmhouse on fifty acres at the end of a dead-end road in a little town where I knew nobody. I lived there alone for two and a half years.

I got a job as a newspaper reporter in New York City. I fell in love and married. My husband and I had a child, and then two more. We built a pond on our land where, winters, we would skate together in the moonlight. My husband made paintings, sometimes of me. Then he didn't paint me anymore.

I published magazine articles and books. I worked hard, drove carpools, cooked meals, went to hundreds of soccer and Little League games, read to our children and played with them and sat on the beach with my eyes locked on the tops of their heads in the water. My husband and I fought, and struggled to stay together.

My father died. I wrote a lot of magazine articles and newspaper columns to support my family. I cared for my mother when she was dying, and fought so bitterly with my sister about our mother's care that I could not attend the funeral. That week, my husband and I parted.

I left the house at the end of that dead-end road. My husband and I didn't fight over the house, but we went to war over custody of our children. I fell in love again, and when that love affair ended, I loved other men. Some of them were good choices, at the time. Some terrible.

I made a new home. I made good friends and lost some. I wrote another book. My sons taught me how to throw a baseball. My daughter hung roses over her bed, and taught me by her own example what it is to be a hopeful and optimistic person who greets the world with open arms.

I planted flower gardens. We got a dog. I taught many women, and a few men, how to bake pies the way my mother taught me. I swam long distances across many New Hampshire lakes and ponds, with the crawl stroke learned from my father.

I turned forty. I sold a book I'd written to the movies, and worried about money a little less for a while. I wrote another book. Now and then I still got so angry about some relatively minor frustration that I would dump a gallon of milk on our kitchen floor. But it didn't happen as much anymore.

My sons grew taller than I was. My daughter knew some things I didn't. I sold the house I'd bought after my marriage ended, and laid most of our possessions in the yard, had a giant tag sale, and then moved with my children to a town in California where we didn't know anybody. We made a new home and new friends there. That was two years ago.

Because I have frequently made myself a character in my work, I wrote about most of these experiences. More and more over the years, I learned to trust my readers with the truth. I published stories and articles about aspects of my experience that some people would have considered shameful or embarrassing. I wanted to tell the story of a real woman with all her flaws. I hoped, by doing that, others might feel less ashamed of their own unmentionable failings and secrets.

Two years ago my daughter Audrey turned eighteen, the age I was when I left home to go to college, and the age I was when I got that first letter from J. D. Salinger.

Audrey was a high school senior. We were still living in New Hampshire. After that year I knew it was unlikely my daughter would live at home ever again.

I had always believed in encouraging my children's independence. But now, out of nowhere, I felt a wave of terrible anxiety for her. All through the years when so many of my friends had fought bitterly with their adolescent daughters, Audrey and I had gotten along. The year she turned eighteen, we didn't.

She was breaking away from me, and I saw myself turning into a hovering and controlling woman. What if I hadn't taught my daughter everything she needed to know as she ventured into the world? I had only a handful of months left. I wasn't ready to let her go.

When I was Audrey's age, I had suffered from eating disorders. It had been a very long time since I had last stuck my finger down my throat or binged on a whole carton of ice cream. Now I found myself looking at my own beautiful daughter and panicking if I saw her turning to food for escape or comfort. "You've eaten half that container of Häagen- Dazs," I'd say, my own stomach tightening, and reach across the counter to put the carton away. One day I started shoveling the ice cream into my own mouth so she wouldn't eat it, all the while believing I was trying to save her.

I stood on the sidelines at her cross-country track meets, waiting for her to cross the finish line, and realized I was breathing with her. I watched the slow ending to what had been an extremely tender and long- lasting relationship with her boyfriend and wept, myself, at their parting. Once when she was at school I entered her bedroom and started to read her journal -- the very thing I had vowed, when I was twelve, I'd never do to any child of mine, because my mother did that to me. I stopped myself, but I couldn't control the frantic feeling.

"I just don't want to see you get in situations where you might get hurt," I told her.

"The only situation where I'm getting hurt," she said with unfamiliar sharpness, "is the one you're creating. What's happening to you?"

Many things were happening. My firstborn child, my only girl, was nearly as old as I was when everything changed for me.

In my senior year in high school, I left my New Hampshire public school to enroll as a day student in Phillips Exeter Academy, a highly competitive prep school with a hundred-and-ninety-year tradition of educating boys. Unable to face meals in the dining hall, and filled with anxiety about college, about boys, about pleasing my parents, and my teachers, I took to eating little besides peanut butter and chocolate, and gained ten pounds. My mother -- a lifelong dieter herself, who had always taken pride in my skinniness -- remarked on this. I began to diet and exercise so rigorously that by the spring of my senior year I weighed 88 pounds.

I sent applications to Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. I spent days bent over a legal pad, refining my answers to the essay questions. I never truly asked myself: Did I want to attend these schools? I only knew I wanted to get in.

My daughter is nothing like the driven young woman I was then. A good but relaxed student, a young woman with a healthy body who's smiling in nearly every photograph I have of her, that college-application season she spent her weekends riding her snowboard in the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont with her many friends. She had no interest in attending Ivy League schools.

She wrote her college essay one afternoon when the snow conditions were lousy, and said maybe she'd polish it up if she had the time. I said her writing needed work. There was nothing I knew better than how to write an essay like this. We'd work on it together, I said, as my parents had done with me.

My daughter kept putting this off. The deadline was approaching, and everything in her applications was complete but the essay question. Not a day went by that I didn't ask her: When are we going to work on it?

The week the applications were due, she was still putting me off. Then it was the final day for getting her applications in the mail. "Come home after your first class," I told her. "I'll be waiting." I was trying to sound more casual than I felt.

Noon came and went. One o'clock, two o'clock. She wasn't home. At two-thirty I turned on my computer and typed her essay myself. At three-thirty, the new version was mostly done. A little before four my daughter walked in the door. She took one look at what I'd done and her face was neither relaxed nor smiling.

"How could you?" she said, looking over my shoulder at the computer screen.

"These aren't my words. I am not you," she said, taking me by the shoulders. "I'm not the Girl Wonder who writes her autobiography when she's eighteen. I don't even want to be."

"I only wanted to help you," I said. "I wanted to spare you pain. I wanted to keep you safe. I wanted you to go to a college where you can be happy."

My daughter was as angry as I've ever seen her. "You stole my voice," she screamed. "You're trying to take over my life. Get out. Get out ."

I knew she wanted to hit me, but she couldn't. When I reached to hug her she pushed me away. We ended up on the floor, wrestling, our legs wrapped around each other. Our arms gripped each other's shoulders. "I don't want to hurt you," she said. "But you have to stop this. I'm stronger than you now."

We were evenly matched. She was younger, and had been running cross- country all that fall. But I had given birth three times, and had a kind of endurance and capacity for pain she couldn't know. We rolled around on the floor for several minutes until we were both dripping with sweat. Then at the same moment, both our bodies went limp, and we lay there in each other's arms, weeping.

That night Audrey completed her essay without assistance from me. She mailed her applications the next morning, one day late.

The blurring of boundaries between my daughter and me is a lifelong problem between us, as it had been for my mother and me. But it wasn't until Audrey turned eighteen that I became so confused trying to keep our two stories straight.

I know what triggered the crisis between my daughter and me. It was observing her extreme trusting nature, her lack of defenses against injury, her seemingly inextinguishable hopefulness. I found myself reliving my own dashed hopes when I was that age. Her face became my mirror. Her body, my body. Her nineteenth year, mine.

We survived it. Audrey took a year off before college to work at a ski resort and go snowboarding. I left the state of New Hampshire where I'd lived all my life and moved, with her younger brothers, to Northern California. But something had changed in me that year. I had caught a glimpse of something in my daughter's face that haunted me.

I don't tell them everything, but my children have heard enough to know I lived with enormous worries, growing up. When I was their age, I was already sending my stories to magazines. I spent my Saturday nights, more often than not, in the company of my parents. I never slept late. I knew I had to get up early and start writing.

More than anything, I wanted to raise children who would have a different kind of childhood from mine. Even when I was still a child myself, I reflected on the kind of mother I would be. I wanted my children to have a home that felt like a safe place for their friends to come, with no fear that an alcoholic parent might come careening into the room and deliver a lecture on the hopelessness of the human condition, or that their mother would inquire into the intimate details of their sexual lives, as mine used to, in the guise of interviewing them for some magazine article she was writing.

Maybe it was faith I wanted to give them. Having grown up, myself, with a bone-deep sense of separateness, I wanted my children to feel at home in the world.

The lives of my three children have included their share of sorrow. Still, all three appear to possess the belief that life is more likely to go well than badly. It's something of an amazement to me that I am related, by blood, to three people who see things with a fundamentally optimistic attitude.

"Sometimes it seems to me life is an endless series of good-byes," I said to Audrey a while back.

"That's funny," she said, looking genuinely surprised. "To me it seems more like a series of hellos."

For years I'd made daily deals in my head: Let my children be safe. I will ask no more. And still, terror that one day one of them might be hurt clutched at my stomach. Now I imagined what I'd feel if a literary legend thirty-five years her senior asked of Audrey what was asked of me when I was her age. I pictured my daughter living through the kind of devastation I had experienced at nineteen, and the shame that had followed it.

For all those years, I had never looked critically at Jerry Salinger. I had always believed I owed him my never-ending silence, loyalty, and protection. It came to me as a new thought that the girl he had invited into his life with that first letter he wrote deserved certain things, too.