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You are not the kind of writer who would be on a best-seller list like this. You are a small, soft-spoken, divorced woman, Georgia-born, a poet and professor of creative writing in San Francisco. You live with a cat called Sister and a tall, handsome younger man named Ed who is also a poet. Your divorce was bitter; your daughter is grown.
You write lines of poetry like this: ''The man in the flat below starts to snore/broad vibrations travel through/the floor, box springs, into my pillow/sine waves that could snap the Golden Gate.''
Your citizenship is American but you love Italy and you move to a small Tuscan town each summer, owner of a 200-year-old, once-abandoned farmhouse on five acres of wild land. (That's where the divorce-settlement dollars went. Hah.) Both house and garden need lots of work. You and Ed begin the time-gobbling project of restoration and as you do, you write a book, Under the Tuscan Sun, about your life as a middle-aged woman who has found happiness among very old stones in a culture not your own — a real-life Enchanted April.
You include literary portraits of neighbors, visitors, tomatoes, Ed. You provide recipes for polenta and gelato. Today, Cortona, Italy, is on the map of pilgrimage places for charmed readers, next to Peter Mayle's Provence, John Berendt's Savannah, Frank McCourt's Limerick, and, before them, the domestic landscapes evoked by the late San Francisco sensualist M.F.K. Fisher. Today, too, the house is beautiful, the fruit and vegetable roots deep in the revivified soil. You write a second book about your second home and call it Bella Tuscany.
Enchanted pilgrims don't stop at the San Francisco address the fiftysomething Mayes shares with Ed Kleinschmidt, 48 — whom she married, after many years together, in 1998 — the way they do in Tuscany. Thanks to Tuscan Sun's staying power on best-seller lists, the couple own a handsome Spanish-style home on a winding tree-lined road that gives way to a sliver view of the Pacific. It is filled with books, rich rugs, and shafts of sunlight through which Sister slinks and yawns. Success led Mayes to take a year off, and she's about to take another; after 20 years in academia, she may never go back.
''I've always been trying to squeeze writing in around the edges of teaching,'' she says, sitting quite still in a bright living room dominated by a huge fireplace that reminds her of her Italian house called Bramasole — ''that which yearns for the sun.'' ''Now I just have the responsibility of being a writer, which is what everyone in my department dreams of, to write their way out of that horrible job.'' Okay, she amends, not horrible. But: ''Sometimes my colleagues have been a little weird about this, and I've been shocked, because I expected all my friends and associates to be thrilled for me. One of my colleagues referred to my book as 'your little food book.' ''
Mayes laughs, a lilting, Southern-lady arpeggio that covers a definite steeliness; prickliness and an intriguingly sexy reserve are part of her personal and literary strengths. In Bella Tuscany — due in bookstores April 14 — she writes irresistibly about dealing with obnoxious guests; not recognizing her ex-husband at her daughter's wedding; happily spending money inherited from a hated aunt; and being in love with Ed. (Small wonder Mayes' relatives ''had a living fit'' when she wanted to publish some earlier autobiographical essays as a book; she decided ''it's not worth it to make everybody upset. I still have those essays — in a little box.'' Now she's writing a novel about where she grew up, which worries her kin enough.)
