A year or so ago, I read the manuscript of a novel about a woman like us – turning 60, facing career challenges, dealing with uncooperative children, redefining love- AND sex – and getting to know her authentic self. Charlotte “Sugar” Kane is a great character and very, very funny in that wry way we enjoy in our friends.

The only problem was that the author, my friend Jane Adams, couldn’t find a publisher interested in fiction about midlife women, so she finally decided to take advantage of the wonders of e-publishing.

The good news is that SUGAR TIME is available through her website www.sugartimethenovel.com and will soon be on Amazon.

Even better news for Jane is the book has now been optioned for a major motion picture! I call that sweet revenge!

You don’t want to leave for vacation this summer without “Sugar” for company. Get your copy of SUGAR TIME, put on sun block, get a towel, ice tea and enjoy!

When my kids were younger and I wanted to have a difficult conversation with one of them, I would wait until we were driving alone in the car. I found that it was easier for me to broach the subject when my gaze was fixed on the road, and it was more likely I would get some feedback if my son or daughter didn’t have to make eye contact either. In that circumstance, the avoidance of eye contact fostered intimacy.

But most of the time intimacy is, for me, precisely about eye contact. I need to see facial expressions, even the mouth moving, in order to continue the conversation, and I need to see something in the eyes in order to venture deeper into my feelings. People in love are all about eye contact. Eye contact is also the source of the momentary intimacy of two strangers acknowledging that, for example, that they both found the way a fellow customer was behaving out of line, or that they both noticed how cute the cocker spaniel in the middle of the sidewalk is.

Internet intimacy is something new for me, both disconcerting and intriguing. Virtual communities offer none of the visual cues I am used to. But they also eliminate other – often harmful – visual clues that enable someone to judge someone else by looks, accent, or station in life. In terms of content, there are almost no barriers, and no consequences. For women, in particular, it is exhilarating to express ourselves without concerns for propriety or hurt feelings.

Such conversations are empowering. Speaking the truth, sharing stories, researching expertise, and finding support – that used to be territory we only shared with our best flesh-and-blood friends. But even then, it was still hard to admit certain things; I once confessed to a friend that I was afraid of disciplining my children for fear of upsetting them, and she seemed so shocked that I regretted the whole conversation. Nowadays such raw admissions are common – and validated – in cyberspace.

An unheralded byproduct of this new intimacy is that we are all becoming fluent in self-expression. As far as I am concerned, this is major. I got an inkling of how transformative internet communication is when I was writing my next book (Fifty Is the New Fifty, out in April). I contacted hundreds of women who had signed up on my website and asked them all kinds of personal questions: How is it to be fifty or sixty or seventy? How are your relationships holding up? Are you burned out at your job? How is your sex life? Do you really understand your finances? The stories I got back were always honest and fresh, and – this was the most amazing aspect to me – they has the authenticity of spoken narrative. In the past, if I wanted a story or anecdote from someone, I had to sit with her – making eye contact – and skillfully draw out emotional details and anecdotes; if, instead, I asked her to write down her responses, the result would be stilted and devoid of detail. Now everyone on line has a loud and proud written voice. That voice speaks the truth to unseen intimates, but even if no one is listening, it gives personal expression – in the same way journaling does – to what we are feeling and experiencing. If I were looking for continuity, I could call this new dimension to communication “I- contact.”

Soon after that find, I unearthed some letters that my daughter had written home from camp at about the same age, some fifteen years ago. Accounts of theatrical triumphs, color-war games, and bunk gossip were intermixed with exclamation points and pleas to be taken home – standard fare. I loved the sight of her new-found script writing and smiled at the recollections of those emotionally tumultuous years evoked in her letters. So much like the ones I sent off decades earlier.

When I mentioned this vein of history to a friend with younger kids, she informed me that campers now e-mailed home. Where her children went, e-mailing was allowed on only one day in the week. And cell phones were prohibited. Very Spartan by prevailing standards, but enough to preclude letter-writing. It is unlikely that she or her children will come across a shoebox of memories in the future. And I am pretty sure her kids won’t have seen enough of their friends’ handwriting to recognize it fifty years later.

I’m not bemoaning the lost intimacy of yesteryear, but I am aware of how capturing experience and communicating it between parents and children is different now. When they go away from home for long periods of time, our kids don’t have a mailing address except for packages and don’t get a local phone number. The contact info is the same – an e-mail address and cell phone. They could be anywhere in the world, for all we would know.

On the other hand, they are much more connected to us than we were to our parents, according to studies of their generation. A recruiter for a major investment firm cited one of those studies to explain why when her company is wooing perspective college graduates, they sometimes fly the parents as well as the candidate to the important interview. They have found that young adults these days actually value their parents’ opinions.

We also have many more levels of intimacy at our disposal than previous families. Not just doing things together. Or talking on the phone. When my daughter was at college, I learned to pick up clues from the medium of choice in her communiqués. An e-mail was either business or school work (another channel of intimacy for us was sharing her papers) or something she didn’t want to hear my reaction to right away. An IM was usually about something she hadn’t processed yet emotionally, and while she wanted feedback in real time, she felt she needed a little time to frame her responses. Text messages were generally about logistics.

While we have lost the notion of snapshots of our children’s early years – I am picturing those yellowing black-and-white photos with the scalloped edges, as well as the decorated envelopes and childish handwriting – we have gained, I think, an evolving comfort zone between our lives that didn’t exist back when my contemporaries were beginning to detach from our parents. That is surely a good thing. I must admit, though, that I regret that the time-capsule evidence of long-ago innocence – mine as well as my children’s – embodied in those letters is not being generated any more.

It is a truism that no one knows what goes on in another person’s marriage, but that doesn’t keep us from trying to figure out why some marriages fall apart and others stick. The “why does she stay married to him” question has come up again recently in the context of the Spitzer meltdown. Certainly the stricken face of the disgraced governor’s humiliated wife Silda will haunt many of us for years to come. Her blank mask as she stood behind him on his Day of Shame recalls the iconic photographs of other women in other circumstances, the widows of assassinated leaders – Jackie Kennedy, Coretta King, Ethel Kennedy – at their husbands’ funerals. Behind the mask, what was each of those women thinking? Was she thinking about what her marriage was really like? What her husband was really like in the privacy of their “understanding”?

We all know less extreme situations that still seem mysterious at the core. The smart, attractive, successful woman who stays with the philandering n’er-do-well or the upbeat, charming, generous husband who stays with his sour, narrow-minded, zenophobic wife. We assume that the one is putting up with the other, but given that we are exploring a mystery, we have to consider the possibility that the situation is reversed. Or there may be something that is very precious at the heart of their relationship – secrets shared, good sex, trust (even in the midst of betrayal?) – that makes all the rest secondary. When Hillary Clinton wrote in her autobiography about the dynamic of her relationship with Bill that they had “started a conversation” in 1971 and that it was still going on, she demystified that particular marriage to my satisfaction.

What makes a marriage endure? Do the partners themselves know what keeps them together? Can anyone say whether it is “good” for either or both of them? Is endurance a marital virtue? Or long shared history a reward? Such questions are particularly pertinent as we outgrow our youth. Children move on, for some of us our work moves into the background while for others it becomes foreground, and the place of her marriage in a woman’s life is open to new scrutiny. We know that two-thirds of over-age-fifty divorces are initiated by women. And most women can think of a hundred reasons why a break-up might happen then. But we know so little about the marriages that stick.

I suspect it has a lot to do with how the people involved are incorporating the changes taking place in their own lives – or how committed they both are to fending off change. I am sure that trust and judgment and laughter play a part, but there must be an ineffable something else – at least in the nurturing unions – that refreshes their curiosity about each other and about how things between them will continue to turn out. My guess is that when it comes down to it, we on the outside aren’t the only ones who don’t know what makes a given marriage work. Perhaps the intrigue of that mystery is the spark that keeps the partners engaged.