Catching sight of Jayne Anne Phillips walking across the lobby of a midtown Manhattan hotel, my brain can't help clicking, Ah yes: With her long brown hair, soft, flappy gray pantsuit and dangly silver earrings, Phillips looks like an elegant, fortyish hippie chick; she looks just as I thought the person who writes about mothers and daughters and female friendship, and who lives with her husband and two sons in the crunchy, no-smoking-on-the-street Boston suburb of Brookline, would look. But then she holds her hand out in greeting and I see her nails and almost gasp. They can't possibly be real, although I am too shy to confirm this: Each one is chip-free, painted a glossy purplish-black, and extends at least an inch and a half beyond the tip of her fingen They are exuberantly trashy; they are completely incongruous; they are, somehow, thrilling.

Of course. This is a lesson I should have already learned from reading Phillips' luminous new novel, MotherKind (Knopf), which is, in many ways, an exploration of the incongruities, the paradoxes, the mystifying jigsaw pieces that make our existence on this planet unquenchably compelling. If also heartbreaking. Set in Boston, and loosely based on Phillips' own life, MotherKind is told from the point of view of Kate, a thirty-one-year-old poet, who finds herself pregnant with her first child at the same moment her beloved mother, Katherine, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The novel (and the cancer) progresses through the space of a year, from winter to winter. As Katherine weakens, the baby thrives, and Kate is left floating in a suspended state, in a kind of emotional amniotic fluid that encompasses both the shattering joy of being a mother and the shattering pain of losing a mother: "Milk seeped into Kate's clothes and sweetened and soured her chest and the cleft between her breasts every time she heard her baby cry. . . . Her breasts let down and her uterus cramped sharply, turning like a small animal inside her, contracting in its nest. When her eyes got wet, her breasts performed, as though she wept milk. She could cry and she could nurse, or when she nursed, she didn't have to cry. Or nursing, she didn't need to cry; her body wept. She wept food and he grew on sorrow."

"I always had in mind," Phillips says now, taking a sip of tea, ''that I wanted to write about what a person descends into when they're dealing with everything at once. And I think this is a universal experience these days: It happens to a lot of women who have children a little later and who are dealing with their parents—if not being ill—then being vulnerable." She pauses, then says quietly, "There's no way to dominate birth or death, you know? There's no way to go in and win the battle. You just have to move with it, surf with it, go with it. And you learn that growing up by being treated like a woman-that whole idea of nurturing, and of understanding something by observing it rather than trying to dominate it."

The second of three children, Phillips gew up in the sleepy town of Buckhanan, West Virginia. She devoted herself to writing as an undergrad, then went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and published her first collection of stories, Black Tickets, to critical acclaim at twenty-six. Since then, she has published three novels (including the extraordinary Machine Dreams) and racked up a series of prestigious literary awards.

The writing process for Phillips has never been entirely pleasurable, and MotherKind, which took her five years to complete, was no exception. "I usually write about the things that are the most difficult for me to think about," she says, shaking her head. "I write to understand something I don't comprehend. Novels represent a whole world~a world you can see from beginning to end, in a way that you can't see with real lives. Your life or anyone else's. It's not quite like having the experience yourself, but it certainly is preparation for that experience." Phillips puts down her tea and leans forward, cupping her knees with her big hands. "It's amazing, really, how that works," she says, her voice shimmying up with sudden excitement. "Novels are against randomness. They're against the idea that nothing matters."

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