AN OLD HOMEMADE RECIPE

First-time author Susan Jedren sounds a lot like Rosie Perez, but writes like no one else. In her debut, Let 'Em Eat Cake, Jedren flexes the taut muscles of her raw and compelling literary voice through Anna Ferrara, a New York City single mom who drives a HomeMade Cakes truck to support herself and her two young sons. The dark-haired, highly aerobicized author has two grown sons and did the same for a cake company in the late '70s. ''It's absolutely all true, but it's not,'' says Jedren, who, despite her tough-girl demeanor, seems almost painfully shy; she wears her sunglasses throughout an interview, removing them for just a second so you can look into her green eyes. ''Those stories are not true. But all the pieces of my life are in there. That's how I lived.'' In the novel Anna confronts sexual harassment and emotional abuse. But both character and author eventually triumph over their greatest obstacle: battered self-esteem. Growing up poor in the Bronx, Jedren harbored a secret passion for Dylan Thomas but never dared believe she herself could write. After years of various odd jobs, she enrolled in a writing program at Columbia University so she could ''see what writers' lives were like.'' She began her novel, but soon put it aside and left school; a chance meeting in 1992 with former classmate Mona Simpson-who asked about the book-finally pushed her back to it. Working as a computer programmer by day (which she still does), Jedren spent a feverish year writing in the middle of the night. ''My agent thinks I'm a great writer, but I don't see it that way,'' says Jedren, who is startled to find herself all of a sudden a kind of gum-cracking Truman Capote, the darling of the Mort Janklow-Sonny Mehta set. ''For me, the whole book is me saying to people, 'I think I'm worth something.'''