I am not a Mormon.

I am not a born-again Christian.

If I sporadically attend the Episcopal Church, it is, in part, because I love the Book of Common Prayer.
However, though some Mormons may not be not fans of my new novel, Cage of Stars -- in which a Mormon girl comes to maturity steeped in vengeance after a brutal crime against her family – I find myself in the position of wanting to defend them.

Why?

Through research and writing, I came to know many Mormons. And I was shocked at the casual prejudice and everyday contempt directed at them, as well as by how few spoke out against that. As my character, Veronica Swan, says, “Even good people think that Mormons are all nuts in a cult who get married off by their leader at the age of 13.”

It’s not true. And it’s not fair.

All Mormons get a bad rap because of the bizarre behavior of a few nuts. Lumped in with the bizarros, they’re all viewed by the rest of us with a kind of prurient glee.

Polygamy (marrying more than one wife) is a fave rave. Taboo and racy, it’s just what we adore: Something we can all gather round and disapprove.

It’s also illegal; and, whatever they claim, people who do are not Mormons. Since 1904, polygamists have been excommunicated by the Church of Jesus Christ of latter day Saints.

But a new website – driven by the HBO hit ‘Big Love’ – has been devoted in recent weeks to debating the “social issue” of plural marriage. In ‘Big Love,’ Bill Paxton (the Everyman Actor) plays a professional man living in Salt Lake City – with three wives, three houses and three families. The brainchild of Mark V. Wilson and Will Scheffer, ‘Big Love’ is touted as the lighter side of polygamy.

Then there’s the dark side.

Also over the past few weeks, Larry King and Anderson Cooper have both given “the issue” full news hours since fugitive polygamist leader and real-estate huckster Warren Jeffs made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

The other nine folks on the list aren’t Mormons. Can you name one?

The first thing people ask me when they hear about my novel is whether I’m a Mormon, since I have seven kids. The second thing they ask is about polygamy.

“Do you know that more than 100,000 Americans live that way?” an intelligent woman chirped last week.

Actually, I don’t. I don’t know even know if I believe it.

Yet, the Polygamy Diaries (a series of Arizona NewsChannel3’s reports on Colorado City, where, allegedly “thousands” of polygamous families live) is getting great fanfare.

Big love is big business.

But in truth, the huge majority of the world’s 10 million Mormons are as appalled by polygamy as Catholics are by the insinuation that all priests are child molesters.

Some splinter fanatics do cling to it. And 100 years ago, there were massive polygamous families. Mormon leaders took a dozen wives, having a dozen children by each. However, Mormons were pioneers. Men didn’t always survive the cross-country trek from the east to Utah. Unmarried women couldn’t own property; their children couldn’t inherit. The decision may have been as much be practical as to propagate – though Mormons are famously prolific when it comes to kids.

The girls who married often were young.

But my own grandfather was 17, and my grandmother 14, when they married, 80 years ago. They were not unique; and their marriage lasted 60 years.

As a beloved friend of mine, Kahlil, a Mormon (and the devout and devoted mother of nine cool kids) says, Mormons get slammed by public and press not just because of historical polygamy (and theirs is not the only religion to have practiced it) but because Mormonism is rather new.

It does embrace some weird beliefs. None, however, is weirder than the notion that, 2,000 years ago, the son of God was born to a woman who never had sex: Mormons believe that the birth of Jesus was the result of a sexual act between Mary and God. Either way, one is able to believe based not on truth, but only on faith.

In the days I spent living with Kahlil’s family and friends, I saw very strict, self-reliant people whose religion was the fabric of life itself. I’d conceived my fictional Ronnie as far too conservative. Mormon youth may not drink or smoke (and this is made fun of…why?)

They do spoof and goof and dance to the same bad music my kids adore – from bands with names such as Wingnut Pilots – and don’t think a day is complete without candy or the computer.
No one handed me tracts or tirades. But they won my respect.

I don’t agree with everything they do. They don’t agree with everything I do. The largest LDS bookstore in Utah refused to stock my novel because, for plot and personal reasons, some of the depictions of Mormon traditions were fictional.

But if we can all go goo-goo over the love child of a Hollywood papa whose religion was founded by a guy who claimed he came from Venus 300 years ago, why can’t we get off the backs of an evangelistic faith that seeks to do no harm? And why can’t we stop clucking over our beliefs about their beliefs – especially the ones they don’t even have?

My friend Jane makes suits and hats and purses that aren't copies of Chanel or other designer suits and dresses, but are "like" these suits and dresses -- and some people think she's cheating.

She's not. It's not in her nature, first of all, and it's also plain not possible. It's as impossible as copying a Givenchy or Elizabeth Arden scent. You may do better. You often do worse. But you never get the exact thing.

A Dior is a Dior is a Dior; and the clothes Jane and her partner make at Sew Beautiful By Natasha and Jane www.uniqueshoppes.com are no more "Dior" knockoffs than novels that are loosely inspired by reali life events (I've written a couple) are fact.

What her customers want, she says, is "custom couture clothing that never goes out of style" and is, for example, a "Chanel-type" suit.

It may seem as though she walks a fine line; but ready-to-wear designers rob from the classics all the time -- in the sense that no one can copyright a tunic or a bubble skirt. While Jane has a limited amount of Chanel fabric and buttons, she changes each garment so much to suit an individual's taste and body style that, in the end, a customer can only says, "Why yes, it is designer...." in the white-lie way a woman can say, "Why, yes, this is my natural hair color.."

A more important point is that Jane sells good feelings and craftsmanship to people who will never be able to afford the real deal -- and perhaps wouldn't feel moral spending $7,000 on a piece of clothing if they could do it. In fact, she explains, there are clothing manufacturers who do make exact copies. One is Alan B. Schwartz, who goes to Hollywood premieres and events with camera in hand, snaps photos and then immediately zips them to his pattern-makers who copy the styles instantly. His trade is the prom-as-Hollywood crows ( http://www.absstyle.com/red_carpet.php?dept=323) and though Jane says that Schwartz does very well, "He does exactly the opposite of what we do. He makes cheap copies in days, instead of constructing a classic garment over weeks.

Fairly or not, styles and flourishes -- from the Empire waist to the batwing sleeve -- can't be copyrighted. And if they could, ironically, designers who get so much attention from their imitators would be out of business.

"Designer fashion shows are for publicity, not for selling clothes," Jane says. They're meant to influence culture through clothing, and to create buzz. The super-wealthy who actually order a human-sized edition of the size-2 runway creation pay very, very, dearly and they are very, very much in the minority.

Jane rarely ever meets her customers. They send their measurements, after choosing a style and having several conversations about what changes would work best with a particular figure type and then -- as men of business have for decades, having suits made in Hong Kong -- receive their garments some weeks later. Only once has someone requested an exact copy; and Jane refused, even though legally, she was within her rights to do so, as is Schwartz.

Some of her garments, according to her customers, are actually more sturdy than true haute courture. The runway garment may be literally pinned onto the model, and designer clothes aren't intended to be made in lots of more than a few.

Jane's customer base is anchored by an actual woman, a size eight or ten, who waits, sometimes for years, to purchase a particular style of garment. And Jane waits until she's sure that garment has staying power before she offers it -- as she doesn't want to end up with bolts of peacock-colored chiffon after the transitory splash made by a single super-bodel's Oscar dresss.

It's an interesting business. And she's an interesting woman, complex and creative to the core. And in the tradition of writing here about interesting sights on interesting sites, hers is one to explore.

Most stories about infertility end in a nursery or a divorce court.

Infertility beats the tar out of a marriage. When two capable adults can't manage to do what 17-year-olds in the back of a car can do without wanting to, it can blow a hole through a relationship.

'WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER' by Anne and Daryl Skaradzinski is a different sort of book about infertility. The couple went so far as the extreme measure of IVF; but they learned that their marriage ultimately was more important than their shared parenthood.

It's a story about two people who love each other deeply, and who recognize that two can make a family. If you want a different perspective on a subject that affects millions of Americans, as many as one in five couples, check out www.achievingfamilies.com.

If there's one thing that's been consistently criticized in my writing, it' s that the endings are happy; or if they aren't happy, they're at least hopeful. Of if they aren't hopeful, completely, they are at least satisfying.

I'm working on finishing my novel that will appear in May, 2007, and am really struggling with the ending.

The first ending to this story -- like CAGE OF STARS, a bit different from what I've done before, an adventure as much as a suspenseful family drama -- was a kind of reunion, a wrapping-up of loose ends. But while some readers loved it to tears, others thought it was too "neat." And I don't want to make things too "neat," because in life, they never are.

So I'm recasting a part of this novel, to try to achieve something that isn't quite a "summming up," yet remains a conclusion rather than a gradual waning away ...

Write and give me your opinions. Do you like a book that ends frankly, with questions answered? Or do you like a book that leaves more to the imagination or even one that is as bittersweet as those things that often happen in our own lives, in which some things are forever unknnown?

This is a discussion forum, as well as the discussion forum elsewhere on this site; so weigh in, if you visit, and give me a holler...

It's a subject not often written, and almost never well, this story of the older woman and the younger man. Only a few times has the tale itself been successful or even plausible -- I think of a novel written a few years back, called A MUCH YOUNGER MAN.

And even that was slightly unsavory, as the "attraction" began when the thirtysomething woman in question became the crush of a 15-year-old boy, the son of her best friend. It smacked a bit of the middle-school teacher and her hip-hop sweetheart to me.

In A MUCH YOUNGER MAN, out of decorum (and with an eye toward rape charges) they waited until the lad turned 18 before slipping between the sheets. When they did, it was much to the ire of the boy's mother, and you know, as the mother of teenage sons, I can't blame her, delicately as the story was told. They then slipped off to another country, the same country in which a similar but very different story, MADEMOISELLE BENOIR, is told.

MADEMOISELLE BENOIR (Houghton Mifflin) by Christine Conrad proves that a story such as this need not be the equivalent of the joke about a dog that stands on its hind legs -- it is not that the thing is done well, it's that it's done at all.

Mlle. Benoir takes far too many chances and gets away with all of them.

First, it's an epistolary novel, a dicey proposition at best, often as ho-hum as reading more than a page of someone else's diary. But the letters in MADEMOISELLE BENOIR crackle as they describe a love story of depth and power, between a young American artist aged 30 and an aristocratic Frenchwoman 20 years older.

That is, she is 50, the dread age no woman is ever supposed to attain and still retain a woman's desires and a woman's allure -- even today, when we're "past all that."

Fifty may be the new forty, but it's not the new thirty. As a man of my acquaintance put it -- very delicately -- when a 36-year-old pal of his fell in love with a 59-year-old woman, "I mean, she's gorgeous, but it's just.. disgusting."

This same acquaintance, I'm at pains to add, cheers his own father for having, at 60, a 35-year-old wife.

Nature still abhors a role reversal -- male nature, that is. And mabye female, too. Women can be as mysognist as the next NASCAR fan. Another acquaintance of mine told me recently about a fellow who dumped his intended (twelve years older) literally at the altar. "I mean, really, though," she said. "Did she ever dream he'd go through with it? What could a man his age have possibly seen in a woman her age?"

Welll, in Conrad's lovely, lively novel, apparently quite a good deal.

The young American, Tim, even gives up a comely bride of tender years not just to woo but to marry the "spinster" Mademoiselle Benoir, the elder of two sisters of an ancient French family. He is very much the whiz-bang American boy, and she is very much the French swan; and yet she accepts his admiration as her due, and returns his passion -- although, in an absolutely charming twist, Mlle Benoir's Catholicism requires that they wait until their wedding night to consummate their love.

Witty, comely Catherine makes her parish pere blush when he praises what he assumes will be a platonic marriage for its recogniton of love on a higher plane. She confesses she woudln't be interested in love of that sort at all.

And though Tim's extraordinary parents are taken aback and full of cautionary remarks, and Catherine's sister flies into an absolute rage, and though even Catherine has moments of tristesse when she recognizes that she quite likely will not be able to give Tim children (not a wish that's on top of the stack of hankies in his drawer), the couple perseveres, despite knowing that her body will change more quickly than his, that he might outlive her, that there will be sniggers and suggestions about brash gold-diggers on gilded soil.

As Conrad describes it, the relationship is one of mutual respect and ineffable affection, which there is no reason to suspect that time will tarnish.

It's an interesting and touching novel, that works despite its quiet pace and unusual form, just as does the marriage of Mademoiselle Benoir.

And just as the marriage of Madame Mitchard does, eight years after she married a man twelve years younger than she.

I'm not assuming that I'm great company.

But I've had a great deal of fun visiting with book clubs and groups of friends around the country over wine, cheese, spinach puffs, outrageous desserts ... and books, especially books.

That's why you should enter the 'CAGE OF STARS' contest, debuted by my publisher in honor of my novel published last month.

If you win, and there are only a few days to enter left, I'll come to your reading group (or your collection of friends; who has to know?) anywhere in the continental United States and bring wine, chocolate and signed copies of the novel for everyone. We'll spend the evening talking about this book, or any of my books, or any books you like.

Since I have friends and acquaintances in almost every state in the union, and there is pretty much nowhere I wouldn't like to re-visiit, please go to the main page and enter. I'll show up on time, I promise!

Jackie