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Gropper quotes another woman who came back to her saying: "I didn't know it was going to be so racy!"

Racy? What are we talking about here, French postcards?

Well, before you ask Gropper if everything in the book is true, she will remind you of her disclaimer right there on the cover: "Fictionalized Memoirs."

"Now wouldn't it spoil the fun if I said which parts are fictionalized?" she asks.

When her granddaughters began e-mailing her with questions about their own careers and relationships, it was the 1990s and Gropper and her husband, Barney Feldman, had retired to Palm Beach County.

She continued to teach creative writing at the Center for Lifetime Learning at Palm Beach Community College where she later served three years as president and still remains active, when it occurred to her that her answers brought back so many of her own life changes. Here, then, was a framework for memoirs.

"I wanted to write about my life for my progeny," Gropper said. "Here was a perfect platform to present my own story."

Or at least a story that mirrors her own life and career.

Names are changed. A gauze of fiction keeps the reader guessing, but not much. Gropper's narrative is compelling because it reads like the best fiction, and can even be a bit unsettling — to the male reader. More than once I thought: "If she's telling the truth, women are a lot more like men than they let on and they owe us a big apology."

Among Gropper's observations:

"You lose a piece of yourself in a relationship... You leave behind more than an imprint in a mattress."

"A woman learns that there is a price to pay for freedom."

"You can be self-centered without being selfish."

The author, like her namesake "Martha" in the book, grew up in a home with a devoted father and a neurotic mother who was convinced Nazis were going to drag her back to Vienna and that women were scheming to steal her husband. Each night, Gropper recalled, her father, a New York tailor, came home exhausted from work to fall asleep in his chair, deaf to his wife's crazed accusations. Her mother needn't have worried.

"A man who is unfaithful and wants to hide it," she wrote from an adult perspective, "comes home with a covering exuberance."

Written from the third-person, we follow the life of a woman who survives the Depression, then attends college a short while before marrying a man who returns wounded from the war.

She re-enrolls in college after her three children are in school and earns degrees that lead to jobs in journalism, high school counseling and teaching. While in college she is befriended by a professor-mentor who remains in her life for years.

In the course of writing assignments for New York magazines, Martha begins a tempestuous relationship with a married New York editor, somehow managing a discretion in all her extracurricular friendships that never seems to affect a loving and "completely satisfying" love affair with her husband and father of her children.

After her husband dies, Martha breaks off the relationship with the married editor when he offers to divorce and marry her. "I reminded him that never once did I tell him that I loved him." During a period of recovery from her losses, she finds solace and intimacy with Lydia, a longtime friend and confidant.

In Not Far from the Tree, there are lessons, confessions, intimacies so rarely shared with a reader that it is easy to find yourself thinking, "Wow! This gal is trusting me with some really personal stuff here."

Then you remember: Esther C. Gropper — journalist, educator, mother, grandmother, wife, lover, sampler of many dishes spread on life's buffet — is trusting everybody with her story.

Not Far from the Tree, $16.95, (Authorhouse) is available on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com; call (561) 649-0136; or e-mail gropperes@aol.com