Made in Texas: a writer's start

However, her first book isn't about success as a public intellectual, life in Boston, or contemporary publishing issues. Wisely choosing memoir over autobiography, Caldwell focuses on how the strong Texas wind blew her all the way to exotic Massachusetts. ''How do we become who we are?" she asks on Page 1. ''I was a girl whose father had taken such pride in her all her life, even when it was masked as rage, that he had lit a fire in me that would stay warm forever. I was the daughter of a . . . mother whose subterranean wish, long unrevealed, was that I might become who she could not."

From girlhood, Caldwell's language and vision are formed by her diverse reading. The grandchild of Texas farmers, she grows up feeling stifled in Amarillo. '' 'Yes, the town is dreary,' Carson McCullers wrote about the Southern backwater of her anti-idyll, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and that was Amarillo." Larry McMurtry grew up not too far away, in Archer City, and some readers will be reminded of his 1999 bibliophilic memoir, ''Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen," by ''A Strong West Wind." Indeed, these books about literature's lifesaving properties are intriguing counterpoints because of differences in generation, gender, and sensibility.

Caldwell begins college at Texas Tech in Lubbock and ends up at the University of Texas in Austin, learning more outside the classroom. ''All those places I'd visited in books were accessible realities, had I the courage and volition to go looking -- to trade in my role as spectator for the drama itself. I had quaked when I read Tolstoy's description of Ivan Ilyich, facing the past from his deathbed, as a man whose life had been 'most ordinary and therefore most terrible.' "