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NEW YORK - In this strange and uncertain literary age, dominated by memoirs that veer into fiction and fiction that veers into memoir more often than purists and writers' families might like, serious readers remind themselves to keep fictional protagonists and their creators separate.

But that's not necessary, or possible, when it comes to novelist Kaye Gibbons and her most famous creation. Because Gibbons is Ellen Foster.

At the same time, Ellen is a larger-than-life fictional character, a gutsy, driven orphan whose story is being taught in some schools along with those of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Mark Twain's Huck Finn, J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield and Harper Lee's Scout Finch.

Gibbons also has written a number of books, including "A Virtuous Woman,"Charms for the Easy Life" and "Divining Women," populated by memorable characters who are not Kaye Gibbons. The season's third Talking Volumes author, popular with critics and Target shoppers alike, tells engaging, sad, funny stories about Southern wives, mothers, daughters and grandmothers who retain their individuality and humanity despite pummelings by mean people and hard times.

"Ellen Foster" (1987), the enduringly popular debut novel she wrote while still in college in North Carolina, is a witty and heart-wrenching fictionalization of Gibbons' own chaotic first decade. Her latest, "The Life All Around Me, By Ellen Foster," follows Ellen into her teen years.

How much of Ellen is Kaye?

"Oh, a lot," she said during a late-November interview in her publisher's Manhattan office.

"That's why she's so much fun to write about. Writing is in many ways an existential form of revenge and correction, a way of reconciling wounds. ... My emotional goal with this book was to heal my mother's suicide. ... A few days after I finished the book, I was walking around and realized that I wasn't obsessed with it anymore. It opened up a large portion of my mind to do other things."

It's hard to talk with Gibbons and not think of Ellen. At 45, she is slender, stylish and endearingly childlike, with a flat, thoughtful delivery punctuated with wit and wisdom -- just like Ellen's -- and a cautious, courteous manner that softens as she relaxes into a conversation. One minute she is recalling how she read the complete works of Edith Wharton, including her books on decorating and travel, as a warmup for writing "Divining Women." The next she is drawling, "Lord, I'm worried about a rat in my hair. I had it all curled and Farrah Fawcett-y, and I hit that rain and I could just feel it blowin' out!"

Her hair, a long, soft wave of red, is fine, and better-looking for the wind and rain, the least of the forces she has weathered.

A childhood without mercy

Gibbons was born Bertha Kaye Batts in rural North Carolina in 1960 to an alcoholic, abusive father who died young (the famous opening line of "Ellen Foster" is, "When I was little, I would think of ways to kill my daddy") and a sweet, ailing mother who committed suicide. Just 10 years old, Kaye was at the mercy of uncaring relatives and foster parents until, as a preteen, she landed with a foster family that loved her just as she was.

It's pretty much ditto for Ellen, whose last name becomes "Foster" in honor of an angelic foster mother.

In the new book, Ellen, a star student, dreams of and works toward attending Harvard, struggles with impossible foster siblings, is unfailingly kind to her endearingly clueless friends Starletta and Stuart, and cauterizes the wound of her mother's suicide. In public, Ellen always appears sure of herself; in private, she wrestles with uncertainties and scars.

And that is pretty much ditto for Gibbons, except that she didn't go to Harvard.

As a child, "I lived on a country road and my neighbors were African-American. There was so much I didn't get," she said. "Only when I moved to town when I was 13 did I run into social stratification and learn what that was like.

"As a teenager growing up, I knew nothing; I didn't know that [her part of North Carolina] was a breeding ground for creativity -- Reynolds Price, Allan Gurganis, Thelonious Monk. I thought that to make a living writing, I had to move to New York City and be famous."

Then, she said, she read the opening of James Weldon Johnson's "Book of American Negro Poetry," in which "he talked about using a small ordinary voice to say incredibly large things. That took care of the fear that as a Southern woman, I would have to write about hairdos, beauty shops and country music. I realized Flaubert was a regional writer, and figured out what gave a work like 'Madame Bovary' universal appeal. Once I figured that out, I could start writing."