Excerpt from Group by Paul Solotaroff, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The others responded with laughter, though it wasn't clear Sara was joking. Indeed, judging by her discomfort, it seemed she was merely stating a fact--one offered, perhaps, in hopes of an exemption.

"Don't worry, Sara," said Lathon, "we don't expect a full bio from you. All we want is a sense of who you are, and what pains you."

"Oh," she said, looking neither relieved nor enlightened. "Well, then, could you go around the circle that way, and come back to me next session? By then, I should have something ready to tell you."

Again, the others laughed, this time in cahoots with Sara, not at her. Apparently, she had an arid, time-released wit that played against her wonderful looks. One moment, she was the low-volt, scattershot ditz; the next, she was pulling quarters out of your ear. Even she seemed surprised by the transformation, smiling a beat late at her own remark.

"It's all right, I'll go," said Lina, testily. "It's crazy to be wasting time on this stuff."

She sat up and uncrossed her legs, then changed her mind and crossed them back again, trying to come to attention in a chair made for slouching. For the first time, I noticed that she had something in her hand, a strand of black worry beads about the size of her palm. As she spoke, she clenched them tightly, whitening her knuckles.

She described herself as a forty-five-year-old mother of two teenagers, and the director of a mental health clinic in the Bronx. Which, she hastened to add, was just a fancy way of saying that she was a social worker who'd gotten kicked upstairs.

"Ah-ah-ah," said Lathon. "Truth in advertising. You're far more than a drone-bee social worker."

Lina looked pained by this assertion of praise. She cocked her head sternly, inclined to dispute it, then exhaled and let it pass. What she was, she said, was an advocate for poor children, someone who scraped for every last dollar so that kids on East Tremont had a place of refuge. In a so-called "boom year" for the city of New York, the families in Morrisania had never been poorer, and the kinds of abuse that came through the door now were just--ah, well, never mind. She hadn't come here, she said, to whine about her job.

Lina paused, her resolve starting to falter; already, her eyes were wet with forming tears. "You know, I don't even know where to start," she said, forcing a smile. "It's all just this . . . mess in my head."

Lathon nodded thoughtfully, mulling it over. "Why not start with what you said when you first came in here?"

"Which was?"

"That you'd been badly betrayed by your husband, Anton, and lost so much weight suffering over it that your kids thought you had cancer."

Lina grunted as if hearing this for the first time. "That's true," she said, bunching her suit jacket, which had a lot of play at the waist. "They're still worried about me; they're always on me to eat. My son says I don't get enough junk food in my diet."

Again, her laugh had that odd tremolo of sadness. Unsure how to respond to it, the others fidgeted.

"Anyway . . . yes, my husband, Anton," said Lina, squeezing her worry beads. She took a deep breath and held it in, as if she were about to be made to crawl across a smoke-filled corridor. "You know, on the train coming down here, I made a pact with myself not to cry. I was just going to tell this as if it happened a long time ago, and I was past it and into my new life. Because I really do believe that if I can just get through this--get the court battle over with, and the money straightened out--get him and all his dirty tricks out of my life--that I can go back to being the person I used to be. Which was someone that was actually happy with herself, and confident about the future."

Tentatively, then, in a voice that caught but didn't break, Lina told the story of her marriage. At twenty-one, the star of her proud Greek family and the first of its women to go to college, she was on the cusp of graduating from Princeton cum laude when she met Anton at a frat-house mixer. He was tall and quite handsome, if something of a dandy, the oldest son of a wealthy Lebanese builder. He'd read Nabokov in three languages, hiked Tibet and Madagascar, and had a photographic memory for filthy jokes. If you stood next to him at a party, you'd meet everyone in the room. People just naturally gravitated to where he was.

Reprinted from GROUP by Paul Solotaroff by permission of Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 1999 by Paul Solotaroff. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.