Right up front, in her author's note, A. Manette Ansay wants us to understand her latest book is fiction.

But there are novels, and then there are Ansay's novels, which flow neatly, sometimes almost directly, from the wellspring of her life.

''There's a lot of me in all my books,'' admits Ansay, author of six novels, a short-story collection and a memoir. ``The way I structure my books begs the question of autobiography. I have to believe the story is true in order to tell it effectively. In most cases a book begins in a way that's grounded in personal experience, but by the end it's fiction. It plants roots in a life I know and then grows up watered by strange sunlight from a different place.''

The roots of Good Things I Wish You (Harper, $25.99), from which Ansay reads Friday at Books & Books in Coral Gables, are firmly imbedded in known territory. Traces (and sometimes more than mere traces) of Ansay's family, her strict Catholic upbringing and her Midwestern background seep through other novels, too. The unhappy family in her debut Vinegar Hill, an Oprah's Book Club Selection, echoes some of the experiences of Ansay's parents and grandparents in the 1970s; Midnight Champagne, a National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist, is set on the shores of Lake Michigan in a rural setting much like the farmland in which Ansay grew up among 67 cousins and more than 200 second cousins; Blue Water draws from her experience living on a sailboat with her ex-husband.

Good Things I Wish You, however, may be even more uniquely Ansay. The novel doesn't just mirror her life; it is her life, in a way. The opening line -- ''My first date in nineteen years was nearly an hour late'' -- is spoken by the recently divorced narrator Jeanette Hochmann, a professor at the University of Miami (Ansay teaches in UM's M.F.A. Creative Writing program), who is commenting (like Ansay) on her first plunge into the dating pool after a divorce.

Like Ansay, Jeanette lives somewhere north of the Palm Beach County line, is often frazzled by the long commute to work, has a young daughter and learns to love flying gliders. Like Ansay, she is fascinated by the life of 19th century German pianist Clara Schumann, her mentally unstable husband Robert and his protégé, composer Johannes Brahms, who may or may not have been Clara's lover. Ansay and, now, Jeanette set out to write biographical books about this intriguing threesome. Instead, they end up writing novels.

Good Things I Wish You, then, is metafiction. Ansay writes two parallel love stories, one contemporary and one historical, illustrating her characters' lives with photographs, sketches and excerpts from letters and exploring the relationships between men and women.

Clara Schumann is ''such a fascinating story, such a timeless story,'' says Ansay, who spent her youth training to be a concert pianist only to be halted by a mysterious muscle disorder (a harrowing story she recounts in her candid, unsentimental memoir Limbo).

'What drove me to research and think about Clara Schumann was my own musical background. The problem is when you start doing that kind of research you get caught up in the musicality of her work. I think that book has been written, the book of documentation, the book of `Aha! Here's another historical fact!' What sometimes get lost is just the immediacy of this story that's 200 years old.

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