Sergio Bustos is The Herald's deputy city editor and a co-author of ``Miami's Criminal Past Uncovered'' (The History Press, 2007). He asked this of Ana Menendez, a former Herald columnist and the author of ``The Last War'' (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99).

Q: In The Last War, your main character's life mirrors your own -- that of a woman married to a war correspondent. Did you find it therapeutic or torturous to share with readers this character's feelings of love and betrayal?

A: Neither. Reducing a novel, or any sustained work of the imagination, to the language of therapy is an insult to both writer and reader. All novels, to one extent or the other, mirror the worlds of their writers. Melville did, in fact, work on a whaling ship. But who remembers or cares?

If The Last War bogs down in the one-dimensional world of gossip and personal history, then I will have failed miserably in the only way that matters. A novel takes years of difficult work. No writer undertakes one lightly, much less in order to act as stenographer to her own story. Fortunately, close readers have grasped that the book is not about the petty details of an ordinary marriage but how, in the words of one reviewer, the layers of delusion and betrayal correspond to a larger world of eternal turmoil.

• 11 a.m. Saturday, Chapman. With her on the PEN International panel will be Francine Prose, Mary Gordon, Michael Thomas and Sam Tanenhaus. Menendez also reads from her book at 1:30 p.m., Pavilion B, with Liz Balmaseda (``Sweet Mary'') and Leonard Pitts Jr. (``Before I Forget'').

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