Amy's taboo relationship and deception is almost more than Isabelle can take. A tidy secretary at a mill, she keeps mostly to herself. One long, humid summer, when she finds herself working side by side with her daughter amidst a cast of other secretly distressed and hilariously disgruntled women, Isabelle must confront her anger and jealousy. In the process, her own carefully guarded secrets of guilt, familial loss and sexual awakening surface. While the time period of Elizabeth Strout's novel is unspecified, there's a certain '60s-era progressivism which encroaches on the town but fails to help people like the aloof Isabelle outgrow the Puritanism of their roots and move forward, slowly, out of their encasement.

Strout gently removes the roofs from the houses in the small town of Shirley Falls, giving us an intimate view of characters like Fat Bev, who makes scatological announcements, and Amy's friend Stacy, whose parents decide to go public about her teen-age pregnancy. Strout exposes their secret hopes and fears -- however ridiculous or sad -- with compassion and humor.

"Amy and Isabelle" is Strout's first novel and has spent two weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list since being released in January. In the wake of her success, Strout -- has been teaching literature and writing in New York for 10 years -- has been compared to writers like Mona Simpson and Anne Tyler. Strout stopped by Salon's offices on the West Coast leg of her book tour to talk about her newfound success and her thoughts on the pressures of raising teen-agers.

The idea of the black thread that connects the mother and daughter is interesting, because it seems really taut and fragile, rather than the term "bond," which most people use when they talk about family. Can you talk about that metaphor?

That's how I envisioned Amy seeing it, this black line. When it's first mentioned, there is this sense that there's no getting away from it. Even if you leave each other's presence -- and of course they're stuck together physically so much it's awful -- but even if they're physically separated, there's this terrible sense of connection. And yet at the same time Amy feels sorry for her mother, seeing her in Avery Clark's office, and feels this ball of love rolling over the black line. So it is this cable, this skinny little fragile thread, that carries all these enormous emotions -- being repulsed by each other, and yet caring so deeply for each other. But it did spring mostly from the sense that they can't get away from each other, which I think is actually how adolescent girls sometimes feel. There's this sense of invasion when a girl is trying to grow up, get out, get away.

Your daughter must have been very young when you wrote this.

Yes, she was. Somebody asked me last night at a reading, "Did you base this on your daughter?" and the answer is just plain no, nor did I base it on myself and my mother. But being a mother and being a daughter helped. My daughter was quite young when I first started it, and she was one of the few people I would actually talk about the book to. She's just a little sweetheart, and she'd come home from school and say, "How was your day?" And I'd say, "Listen to this! Fat Bev had to break up a fight in the bathroom." She knew in a certain way all along what the book was about. And now, between the time that it was sold to the time that it was published, she's become a teen-ager. It's ironic, that now I have a girl the age of Amy.

It's impressive the way you capture the mood swings that both of them share. You walk into the grocery store feeling terrific and you walk out with dark clouds inside your head. That seems so true to life to being a teen-ager.

I think it's so hard being a teen-ager. I know it's been a long time since I've been one, but my heart is very much back there. I think the mood swings are so confusing. They are affected by the people you live with. If you're a teen-ager, your mood swings do affect your parents. You don't realize it, but of course they do. And vice versa. You might come home in a really good mood and your mother's not, and you feel horrible because you always feel responsible if your parent isn't happy, which is a terrible burden.

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