Who lives here. I'm fifty-two, a novelist, twice divorced (the second one is still drying), mother of one grown daughter and tenant of one drafty loft on the fourth floor of an old hat factory in SoHo, from back when the neighborhood was cheap and the hats were real. I write paperback romances under a name I will not tell you. Please don't guess in e-mail; I'll only lie, and I lie professionally.

Why "The Glass House"? Because people who live in them shouldn't throw stones, and because at forty-nine I decided to live in one anyway.

A note on the people in these pages: everyone here has agreed to be here, or has died, or is my second ex-husband and has asked to be left out, which he now is. If you know us in real life, be gentle with what you read.

The book is due Friday. Old readers know the drill: the book is always due Friday, I am always at chapter twenty-one of twenty-three, and my editor always says, in her kind Tuesday voice, "Just send what you have, Viv," which is editor for "a printing plant in Pennsylvania has your name on a clipboard."

My heroine (I can tell you her name; marketing will change it anyway) is Morwenna. She lives on the north coast of Cornwall in 1887 and has more backbone than I had at her age. Tonight she told the lighthouse keeper's brother what she thinks of him. It took four pages and I had to lie down after.

Friday I went with Nina to her sonogram. They don't want to know if it's a boy or a girl, and if I find out by accident I'm not to put it here, so relax. On the screen: a profile like a question mark, one small hand up by the face as if shading its eyes. Daniel wrote down everything the technician said. Nina held my hand, not his, which I will be insufferable about until February.

Last night Abe and I walked to the river. It was not a date. We have agreed it is not a date, the way two people agree it isn't raining while they both open umbrellas. At the end of the pier he told me about Ruth: forty-one years of Ruth, who kept the tomatoes on the roof before he did and talked to them in Yiddish because she said English was too bossy for plants.

On the way back I asked whether he minds being in here. I've been careful: "Abe," with his blessing, and nothing he's told me in confidence. He doesn't own a computer (he owns a letterpress, which he says is the same thing, only slower), but his granddaughter printed out every entry since August and he read them with a pencil. "You made me sound very nice," he said. "Make me taller."

So, for the record: Abe is six foot two.

I don't know what this is. I am fifty-two years old and I do not know what this is, and the people who write to me say that's the good part. Five days. Back to Cornwall.

First day of autumn. Day and night the same length, which is more than I can say for chapters nineteen and twenty. Too tired to be interesting. Sunday, I promise.

Abe is fasting today. Yom Kippur. He explained it to me in the elevator Saturday, and the part that caught in me was this: before you ask God to forgive what you've done to other people, you're supposed to go to those people and ask them first. God, apparently, won't take the call until you have.

I'm not Jewish. I was raised Episcopalian in Hartford, where we atoned by writing a check. But this afternoon I made a list of everyone I've written about in this house, and what I might owe them. My mother, who died in 1997 and can't object, which is not the same as not minding. Paul, Nina's father, whom I have made funnier than he is and less kind than he was. Nina, over and over and over. R.

I didn't send anything to anyone. A list is not an apology. But it's on my desk under the pencil cup, which in this house is where the serious documents live.

Abe broke his fast at his daughter's in Teaneck and came home at ten with a foil pan of noodle kugel and three bagels. "She makes too much," he said. "Every year, she makes too much." I've had two helpings. I don't feel atoned. I feel full.

It has rained since before I woke: the back end of that enormous hurricane, the one that sent half of Florida onto the interstates this week. By the time it reached Manhattan it had lost its manners but not its water. The skylight over my desk, which the landlord fixed in 1994 and again in 1997, has opinions. I have three pots and the salad spinner deployed. Chapter nineteen is in a Ziploc bag.

I keep thinking of North Carolina. Some of you read this from there; I know because you write. The pictures on the news tonight are frightening. When you can, send me one line. Just "dry" will do.

At four o'clock Abe came down with a roll of plastic sheeting and a staple gun he says he last used in the Eisenhower administration. We took turns standing on my desk chair and tented the skylight. It's holding. The salad spinner is off duty.

Fifty-two today. Fifty-two is a deck of cards. Fifty-two is weeks in a year. It is also, roughly, the number of times I've been told this year that I "don't look it," which I have decided to believe.

Nina and Daniel took me to the little place on Sullivan Street with candles in the Chianti bottles, unchanged since I wheeled Nina in there in a stroller. Nina ordered for three, "because I'm eating for two and you're eating for sentiment." She is showing a little, if you know where to look, and I do. The waiter brought a cannoli with a candle in it and did not sing, which is why I love him.

Paul called from Vermont and sang, badly, on purpose, as he has every year for twenty-four years of being divorced from me. There's a lesson in that, and I'm not ready to learn it. R. did not call. That was correct of him.

When I came home there was something on my doormat: a tomato, the last one off the roof, with a birthday candle stuck in the top, and a card. Printed. Actually printed, on Abe's little hand press, in an old typeface with serifs like the feet of a piano: HAPPY BIRTHDAY 4B. He set every letter by hand, backwards, and he's been at his daughter's in Teaneck since Friday for Rosh Hashanah, the new year, so he must have done it Thursday night and kept it secret for three days, which in this building is a record.

The card is on the refrigerator. I ate the tomato with salt, standing over the sink, like a teenager.

Labor Day, and I did. Three thousand one hundred words, most of them usable. Every romance novelist has one word she has sworn off forever. Mine is "heaving." Today I heaved twice and left them both in; I'll kill them in the morning. The book stands at 71,000 words and is due October first at 90,000. You do the arithmetic. I did, and then I made a gin and tonic about it.

Somebody always asks, this time of year, which name I write under. Still not telling. It isn't modesty. The woman who writes those books is braver and thinner and has much better hair than I do, and I don't want to spoil her for you. She's out there on the drugstore rack between the reading glasses and the batteries, and she's doing fine.

Richard wrote. An e-mail, which from Richard is a telegram: short, correct, and it cost him something.

He has been reading the journal. For three years he swore he never looked. He looks. He would like me, "with respect," to stop writing about him now that the marriage is over. He says I get the last word on the drugstore rack and on the Internet both, and he has nobody to tell his side to but the dog.

He's right. I hate it, and he's right.

Here is the thing about living in a glass house: I chose it. I put up every pane myself, one entry at a time. Richard never chose it. He just happened to be standing in the living room when I took down the curtains.

So he is R. now, and after tonight he is nobody at all in these pages. I've gone back through the archives and taken down two entries from last winter that were more about his faults than about my feelings. The rest stays, because the rest is mine.

To the readers who will write to tell me I'm being too generous: thank you, and no.

Up before six to watch the eclipse on television, because the book is set in Cornwall and Morwenna would have wanted me to. The shadow crossed right over her coast. Mostly the English got clouds. The cameras showed a crowd on a hillside in the drizzle going dark at eleven in the morning, their time, and the whole crowd cheering at nothing, at gray going to black. I cried a little into my coffee. I'm fifty-one and I cry at weather now.

Afterward I took the garbage down and properly met the man from the fifth floor, the one with the tomatoes on the roof. He was holding the freight elevator with his foot, a paper bag of tomatoes in his arms, and he said, "You're the one who types at night. I hear you through my floor. You type like a woman who's angry at somebody." I said I was writing a love story. He said, "That's what I said."

His name is Abe. He set type for forty years. His wife died two winters ago. He gave me four tomatoes and wouldn't take any back.

I have been sitting on this since the Fourth of July like a hen on a doorknob, and as of this afternoon I have permission, in writing (well, in e-mail, with three exclamation points), to tell you:

Nina is having a baby.

In February. She's twenty-seven and healthy and has been sick every morning since June, and she will eat nothing but saltines and, for reasons no one can explain, pickled beets. Daniel has read four books on the subject and quotes them at dinner. I am going to be a grandmother at fifty-two, which is exactly the right age, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

Some of you have been here long enough to remember October of '97, when I wrote about Nina without asking, and she asked me to take it down, and I did, and we barely spoke for a month. (It's in the archives: not the entry, the one I wrote after.) Since then the rule has been simple. Nina's news is Nina's to tell. She told Daniel's parents on Saturday. She told me on Sunday I could tell "your glass house people." It took me until today to find words that weren't all capital letters.

Three weeks ago the divorce was final, and I sat in this chair and wrote that I didn't know what came next. This is what comes next. Somebody new.