Jane Smiley, Solving Puzzles in the Hills

And yet . . .

To read "Ten Days in the Hills" and spend an afternoon with its distinctly non-boring author is to see that she's about much more than literary mechanics. And it's to encounter plenty of emotional connections between this ostensibly detached technician and the fictional universes she creates.

'It Was Write or Die'

She grew up book- and horse-crazy in the suburbs of St. Louis. Key words: "grew" and "up." Because for Smiley, who's 6-feet-2 and thin enough so she looks even taller, height was destiny.

"I got to be six feet tall when I was 14," she says. "So it was pretty clear that if I was going to be married and have a regular love life and kids and stuff, desperate measures were required."

She's not joking, or at least not much. This was the early 1960s, a time when you didn't see six-foot women strutting proudly through boardrooms in high heels or stuffing basketballs down other players' throats. Tall girls, Smiley says, were more likely to be given hormones to stunt their growth.

She arrived at Vassar in 1967 without having had a serious boyfriend. Taking the initiative seemed the thing to do. She fixed on a likable guy from Yale for one qualification alone:

"He was 6-foot-10."

An ill-advised marriage ensued.

The tall husband headed off for graduate work at the University of Iowa. Smiley went too, and wound up working toward a doctorate in medieval literature. After they broke up, she found herself spending a year in Reykjavik, researching a potential dissertation on an Icelandic saga and writing short stories in her spare time.

"It was write or die," she says. "There was nothing else to do."

Returning to Iowa in 1977, she was primed to abandon scholarship for fiction. She'd brought back enough stories for a creative dissertation ("it took me about five minutes") and the concepts for three novels.

The first two became "Barn Blind" and "At Paradise Gate." And the latter, according to Lucy Silag -- one of Smiley's two daughters from her second marriage -- was in clear violation of the no-autobiography rule.