LATE ONE NIGHT, as Carol Dawson was driving her white Toyota hatchback between Auckland and Workworth, in New Zealand, she heard on the radio that Liz Taylor was getting a divorce. Since Dawson was "musing upon her own self-enforced celibacy at the time," and in fact was coming back from a date, the story seemed somehow apposite. She remembers thinking, "God, what a lot of mothers-in-law she's had," and then it suddenly struck her that here was a subject worth exploring. "The relationship between a woman and her mother-in-law hasn't really been written about since the book of Ruth," she says, only half jokingly. Thus was born the idea for The Mother-in-Law Diaries, her fourth novel, out in January from Algonquin.

Dawson's novel is a change of pace from her previous three, which are darker and more dense. She has run the gamut from the tour-de-force magical realism of Body of Knowledge (1994) to the Texas-bred existential dread of Meeting the Minotaur (1997) to the almost perfectly contained story told in her first novel, The Waking Spell (1992), where the ghosts of four generations of East Texas women intermingle.

Long admired as a serious writer by a coterie of literary readers, Dawson might very well broaden her audience with this new novel. Its mixing of the savory and the sour, and its knowing look at the mores and territorial imperatives of contemporary Southern women may remind readers of Fannie Flagg or Lee Smith, two of the South's most popular women writers.

Although Dawson is not normally drawn to autobiography in her work, The Mother-in-Law Diaries owes its inspiration to Dawson's own experiences. She is quick to say, however, that Lulu Penfield, her heroine, is not simply her stand-in. Before PW even poses the question, Dawson says, definitively, "I have not been married the number of times Lulu Penfield is married," which is four. Dawson d s admit to having been married at least twice; at present, she's not.

In The Mother-in-Law Diaries, Lulu rides the liberating currents of the 1960s and '70s (looking like "Janis Joplin's street-kid sister") and gazes back from the more staid '90s with a wry affection for all that dispersed love. Lulu has the courage not to disavow her past, even if it includes such figures as the husband who takes her to New Zealand and abuses her, or the mother-in-law who believes herself to be a witch. The novel is the literary equivalent of a Bonny Raitt song -- equal parts rueful wisdom and to-hell-with-it, Texas-style feminism.

"My lodestone is whether a novel contributes," Dawson says, and by that standard one has to admire the moral artistry in the book, treading that narrow line between regret and the greater self-knowledge. The ingenuity of using Lulu's mothers-in-law as a sort of antiphonal counterpoint to Lulu's adventures with husbands, pregnancy and child-rearing allows her to strike all the notes, from the purely comic to the poignant.

The photograph of the author on the back cover of Meeting the Minotaur shows a raven-haired woman with pale skin, her face slightly tilted back, a laugh parting her lips. Her stance is just slightly off-balance, as though she were a ballerina between acts. When PW calls, Dawson suggests beginning with a leisurely stroll around her Austin, Tex., neighborhood, ending at a popular breakfast spot. Keeping up with Dawson is no easy task. Our route takes us through several tree-lined residential streets, and she emanates a stream of talk in a wonderfully Southern voice, which modulates from magisterial pronouncements to the very friendly hi's she distributes to the homeowners we pass by. There is something droll about the way she will interrupt some thought about Emerson on fate, or Faulkner, to make sure a man raking leaves on this Saturday morning d sn't feel snubbed.

Dawson's small-town ways go back to the Texas town of her birth, Corsicana. It is also the prototype of Bernice, the town from which all of the protagonists in her novels hail. Not that they're set there-rather, her characters are always distancing themselves from Bernice. One feels the town's presence in the way Dawson's characters think of themselves in other locales, even though one is never long in the town itself.

There is a quality of exile to Dawson's work, just as there is to her own life. She's resided in New Zealand, New Mexico, England and Italy. Dawson explains her peripatetic existence by simply saying she likes to travel, and somehow manages to scrape together the money to do so. In her first foreign sojourn, in England, she worked in a basement for a solicitor, typing wills. "This was before computers," she says, "and you can't make a mistake on a will. It was an experience that lends a whole new dimension to The Christmas Carol."

Her other foreign travels have been on a more elevated plane. Her last residence in New Zealand occurred because she was asked by a Maori group to write a documentary, which has since evolved into a book that she expects to publish with Penguin New Zealand. Even her return last year to the U.S. is to Austin, the one place in Texas that people always say isn't like Texas.

Still, she is most certainly a Texan. "My grandfather," she says, "was a Baptist minister in Waco. He helped draft the section of the charter of the U.N. that covered religious liberties, because he was the expert on separation of church and state." Her father is a lawyer, and she grew up in the aura of that professional class respectability that in the pre-Civil Rights South was very much a strict set of d s and don'ts. In The Mother-in-Law Diaries, Lulu Penfield flees her hometown at 16, just as Dawson did, to go to boarding school in Dallas. As far back as Dawson can remember, Corsicana was too narrow for her. Corsicana, on the other hand, found Dawson to be some kind of astonishment: "When I was 10 they called me Miss Webster," she says, her voice still holding some exasperation at the memory. "People just weren't used to somebody actually using the language."

Southern culture has a tradition of nourishing its sharpest eyes and most ironic minds (Kate Chopin, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter) by trying to stomp them out at an early age. In Dawson's case, as with her predecessors, the irony is that her outsider status has simply sharpened her talent for inference, for gathering hints and stories. Even the town's newspaper, she says, has maintained a discreet silence about her uvre so far. As for her family, she notes that her father really liked her last book, Meeting the Minotaur, because, as he said, it had action. She laughs. "He thought the other ones were too talk-y."

After graduating from University of Texas in Austin in 1975, Dawson departed for California with her husband, a scientist. Her itinerary is tracked, for the most part, in The Mother-in-Law Diaries. The traveling has broadened her sense of what can be done in writing, so her novels, compulsively concerned with place, avoid parochial regionalism and the perils of nostalgia. She's worried, now, that her children (she has three, including a teen daughter and son who live with her) might not have had the sense of place that she had growing up. "Partly that is why I came back to Texas," she says.

Her own sense of return is complicated. When she first moved back from New Zealand, it was to the America of the mid-Reagan era. "That was a complete cultural shock," she says. She moved to Taos to devote herself full-time to writing, and because it was "the place in the United States least like the United States." She then moved to Washington State (where she found the rain unbearable), before returning to New Zealand to write her documentary. She sees similarities between Texas and New Zealand and Australia, especially on the literary level. "New Zealand and Australian novelists don't hesitate to present truth eloquently and without any sentimentality. Texas writers, if they don't get beguiled by their own myth, are like that too."

A Writer's Labyrinth
Dawson started out as a p t but when she actually saw her p ms in print (a collection called Job was issued by the Goodwill Press in 1975), "I saw that I was not a first-rate p t. And I see no reason to be a p t if you aren't first-rate." Prose, more receptive to her discursive turn of mind, was the answer. The first novel she showed anybody (a treatment of the Theseus myth from Ariadne's point of view) was taken up by the West Coast representative of a large publishing house she prefers not to name. He told her she was a natural writer, and sent the manuscript to the East coast office for comments. The East coast office lost it. "I was relieved, actually," Dawson says, "since I'd already gone on to my next book, and I knew that it was much better."

She sent out that book, The Waking Spell, on her own after having fired her agent. She made a list of publishers to send it to, with Algonquin's name at the top. Since she had moved to Taos at the time to write, naturally a lot was riding on this venture. After not hearing back from Algonquin for two months, she experienced that despair familiar to budding novelists: "I decided to get into another profession, and applied to grad school in archeology." Then she got a humorously abrupt acceptance call from editor Louis Rubin (who, according to Dawson, d s not like to use the phone), and her career as a novelist began.

The Waking Spell made considerable noise for a first novel, meriting a starred PW review and a review in the Times Book Review. Since then, each of her books has been met with positive reviews. Although the topics are different, she sees a common motif. Each book is about the way "narrative transcends fate. Once you mythologize something, it takes on a structure you do not have to be imprisoned within." Which is why all her books involve a central figure coming to grips with the history of his or her family, and many times, as in her latest novel, passing along that history. Body of Knowledge, which Dawson thinks is her best to date, is an especially striking display of her inventiveness, with its central figures being a 600-pound woman, Victoria Grace Ransom, and a black maid, Viola, the repository, ironically enough, for the history of the Ransoms, the white family she works for.

All of her novels have been published by Algonquin. Midway through the editing of her first novel, she panicked a bit when Workman bought the company, and Louis Rubin devolved the rest of the editing to his son, Robert. Despite Dawson's initial apprehensions, it turned out that Workman was intent on preserving the Algonquin culture, and that Robert was an excellent editor. Dawson is so positive about the way Algonquin nurtures writers that one is tempted to probe for some discordant note. When asked if Algonquin's reputation as a Southern publishing house imposes any limitations on her work, she is quick to point out that the house has become national. "By no stretch of the imagination can you describe Julia Alvarez as a Southern writer," she says.

When Robert Rubin left Algonquin, Kathy Porries, whom Dawson calls "terrific," became the editor for The Mother-in-Law Diaries. It is rare for a writer who has passed through so many editors at a house to have such good luck in finding the necessary empathy, but Dawson has. She says that Algonquin is the kind of publishing house where, "when you lose an editor, your books don't disappear." Advised to find an agent after The Waking Spell, she chose Donna Chernoff, who had written offering her services, and after that, Donna's partner Kim Witherspoon, and her assistant, Maria Massie.

Before our interview ends on Dawson's porch, she brings out the manuscript of her next novel and reads a few pages. In Dawson's case, "next novel" signifies a plurality, since she has five novels in various stages of construction. As she reads with a conscious surrender to the terms and scansion of her character's voice, PW can see how Dawson's original desire to be a p t has been achieved in a deeper sense, that sense in which Emerson uses the word: one who creates "by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors."