''Because of health issues in recent years, Kaye has no income,'' David Batts wrote. ``She is facing a long uphill recovery. Our family has decided to contact the many friends who have cared about Kaye and have expressed a wish to help her during this tragic situation.''

A GUILTY PLEA

Gibbons pleaded guilty March 10 to five misdemeanor counts of obtaining property by fraud and received a 90-day suspended sentence. Her attorney said she is speaking at high schools and colleges about her addiction and arrest.

''She looks like a completely different person,'' said attorney Roger Smith Jr.

Her recovery was slowed when she fell down some steps, breaking her foot in three places and tearing ligaments in an ankle, Barbara Batts said in an e-mail in late April.

''Is in wheelchair and walker. Slowed down for now,'' she wrote.

She's still changing plans.

In a March 2006 e-mail, Gibbons wrote about her new book, to be published in 2008. She would introduce each chapter of Lunatic's Ball with 19th century teaser summaries.

'Here's the first one . . . best time writing I've ever had. . . . `Moral insanity' was the diagnosis for opinionated women who violated the order of drawing-room society, i.e., us.''

Two thousand eight came and went. The novel was not published.

But Gibbons says she's now at work on a different book, about a mother and twin daughters, set in Reconstruction New Orleans and based on what was a back story in Lunatic's Ball. Harcourt Brace says the new book, The Secret Devotions of Mary Magdalene, will be scheduled for publication ``as soon as she's done.''

Appropriately enough, the unfinished manuscript opens with these lines:

``Everything's going to be all right. I'm almost in America.''

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