n some ways, I wrote the book because I wanted to get to the bottom of why one boy would end up being such a magnet for a whole family’s energy.”

Her father bought her an Olivetti typewriter, and she began chronicling the family’s tragic and bizarre events as told to her by her mother, a natural storyteller with a sense of humor.

She wrote 12 pages and called her miniature novel The House Behind Yellow Doors. Then she fell from a tree while playing Tarzan and Jane and broke her right arm, putting a crimp in her nascent writing career. Years later, she continued with her dream to become a writer. She received a B.A. in English from Louisiana State University, where a professor told her that women don’t make good poets. “Who knows why I believed him,” she wonders.

So Recknagel, instead, became a journalist. She moved to Houston and did freelance work for a golf newspaper, a real estate magazine, and a travel brochure. She eventually got a job with the now-defunct feminist magazine Breakthrough. One of her first assignments was to interview a female nude model who had posed for a tool calendar.

Eventually she took a job in the public relations department of the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences, where she worked for four years. Her desire to be a writer continued to grow stronger, and one day, she walked the few blocks from her job and applied for the Ph.D. program in English at Rice.

“I wanted to read all the classics, get a mastery of literature, and learn how to proceed in my writing career,” she says. “I’m rather compulsive.”

After completing her dissertation on Lillian Hellman’s memoir in 1988, Recknagel graduated and began studying psychoanalysis at the Houston–Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute. She was only the second layperson to be admitted into the institute, where she studied for two years. She didn’t plan to be a psychoanalyst; rather, she wanted to use her training to help her with her writing. “I was still trying to figure out my family,” she says.

When Jamie entered her life, Recknagel had been teaching creative writing at Rice and editing Gulf Coast magazine. Recknagel gave up writing for almost six years until Jamie was responsible enough to live on his own. “And then I thought ‘Oh, my. What am I going to do with myself?’” she says. “I had empty nest syndrome.”

So, she says, she thought about what she used to do before Jamie showed up. And then she remembered that she wanted to write. “I really missed putting sentences together,” she explains. She applied to Bennington College Writing Seminars in Vermont, where students spend two weeks a semester on campus and the rest of the time in correspondence with their instructors.

At Bennington, her instructor, Susan Cheever, dissuaded Recknagel from writing a book about women friendship, saying it wasn’t very interesting. Recknagel then told her about Jamie, and Cheever said yes, that was her book.

“I had to tell the story for Jamie. He was so voiceless and so helpless that he could have easily been another person who got washed under and never heard from again,” says Recknagel. “It was my gift to him.”

Recknagel wrote her memoir in two and half years and received an M.F.A. from Bennington in 1999. “I couldn’t stop writing once I started,” says Recknagel. The sentences poured out of her, sometimes 15 hours at a stretch. She rewrote the complete manuscript several times until each sentence was almost perfect. Her writing instructor, Bob Shacochis, would always remind her to avoid flabby sentences. “He would tell me: ‘Every sentence has to have the same vitality, the same punch, the same life blood as the first sentence.’”

Here’s Recknagel describing Jamie when he appeared at her doorsteps: “He reminded me of a Matisse sculpture in which the human figure is barely emerging from the black stone, still at war with the inert mass that holds it back.”

The memoir’s structure presented another problem for Recknagel. One of her writing instructors was in favor of a linear story line, but Recknagel preferred a circular structure in which the narrator draws vignettes of the main characters and occasionally goes off into tangents. “The timing has to be just right to pull this off,” she explains. “You have to see how far readers will go before you have to reel them into the main story.” Recknagel says she made a diagram that she kept at her desk to remind her that the Jamie story was a refrain she needed to return to often.

In writing the memoir, Recknagel used all the elements of fiction: scenes, dialogue, character development, and setting. But she also learned that in nonfiction the author can reflect upon the narrative. She used her psychoanalytical background to examine her family and their actions so that she could come to terms with them. “In some ways,” she says, “I wrote the book because I wanted to get to the bottom of why one boy would end up being such a magnet for a whole family’s energy.”

When the book was being considered for publication, Recknagel was concerned that the memoir might be too intrusive on Jamie’s privacy. One night as they walked around the Menil Collection in Houston, she asked Jamie if he would be all right with the book. “He put his arms on my shoulders and said ‘I want you to have the recognition.’”

At that time, Recknagel says she did not realize that gratitude can be a huge burden and had not understood how much that had weighed on Jamie. “Once the book came out,” she says, “he realized that he had given me so much, that he had given me a sense of myself, and that he had trusted me to come up to the plate to help him.”

Sitting inside a French bakery, Jamie is drinking a cappuccino with his aunt. He has changed his name to Dante to signify the start of a new life. “I have been to hell and back,” he explains. The towering nephew—he stands six feet four inches—radiates happiness as he talks about the book. “It is economically beautiful. It is pure poetry,” he says.

Asked what he thinks about his aunt, he replies: “She saved my life. I probably would have been dead by now if it weren’t for her. Or worse, I would be institutionalized.” As Recknagel listens, tears stream down her face. Then Dante turns to her and says, “You were a cast iron bitch, and that’s what saved me.”

Recknagel laughs with agreement. “I was hell on wheels at times.”