This pretty much guarantees that I'll never have a third husband, but you can't have everything. Mostly, I have fun.

I told Mother Mary the news about the book when she was visiting. She was sitting at my kitchen island, her neat head bent over the crossword puzzle, her close-cropped hair showing a grayish whorl. A hearing aid nestled behind each ear, like a plastic parenthesis. Next to her sat a mug of coffee, with a napkin covering the top. She always covers her drinks, perhaps to keep out airborne bacteria or incoming helicopters.

So I broke the news, and she looked up, lifting a sparse silver eyebrow.

"Why?" she asked.

"Why, what?"

"Why are they making a book about the columns? Who's gonna buy that?"

"I hope some people will. It's funny, right?"

"Yeah, but they already read the columns in the paper."

"Well, they might have missed some, or they might want them all in one place, or they might give it as a present for the holidays."

She looked at me blankly, a slow blink of milky brown eyes, behind bifocals.

"Ma, not everybody lives in Philly and gets the Inquirer. You, for example, in Miami."

"I don't need the paper, or the book. Cousin Nana mails me the column or tells me what it's about."

This is true. Never mind that the columns are online, so that Brother Frank can get one and print a copy for her every Sunday. Instead, she prefers to rely on Cousin Nana from South Philly, and I have stopped pointing out that, in hearing "what it's about," she misses these superbly crafted sentences. I tried another tack:

"Ma, the cool thing is that you're going to be in a book. People will read about your lab coat and your traveling back scratcher. They'll know you hate Raquel Welch and love Omar Sharif. Are you excited?"

"No," she sniffs. "Who cares? Nobody cares."

"They do. At least, some of them do."

This is also true, if my e-mail is any indication, and thank you for writing to me. Mother Mary always gets rave reviews. She's like the American Idol of Mothers. Rather, the Survivor of Mothers. Or maybe I'm the survivor.

Then I got another idea. "Ma. I'm going to have a few book signings, and you should come. I'm sure people would have questions for you, and you could answer them. Wouldn't that be fun?"

"No." She went back to her puzzle. "I'm not going."

"You could even sign the books."

"Why would I?"

I left it alone, knowing that it was too soon to start campaigning in earnest. The book will be published Nov. 24, and by then, I'll guilt her into coming. After all, she's the reason I started writing, though she'll never know it from me, because she doesn't read the column and Cousin Nana might forget to tell her this part.

To explain, I've always loved this quote of Eleanor Roosevelt's: "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she's in hot water."

I always knew that was true, if only from living with Mother Mary, who had been in more hot water than any 50 tea bags and had come out stronger. Later, I saw that strength in my girlfriends, and I started writing because I wanted to see in print the kind of women I saw in real life. I think of them as extraordinary, ordinary women. Tea bags, all. Hence, this column, now bookified.

That's why the book also has a subtitle, which is The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman. I think it sums up the point, doesn't it?

So enjoy the book, and save your questions for Mother Mary.

She has all the answers.