Glass is describing the alchemies of baking and love, but she could also be telling us how to concoct a great second novel. Long and patient experience? Check. Profound understanding? Check. Balance, heat, chemistry? All of the above.

Glass was 46 when Three Junes hit a literary hole-in-one, edging out such acclaimed bestsellers as The Lovely Bones, Everything Is Illuminated, and The Dive From Clausen's Pier; one of the judges compared her book to a 25-year-old single-malt whiskey. The well-reviewed, modest success vaulted onto the bestseller list.

A major award, literary acclaim, and commercial success: It sounds like the Triple Crown. But life, like good writing, is never that simple. Glass's dream publication was the light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

Born of blue-blooded New England stock, the author led what might seem a charmed life until her mid-thirties. She excelled in school, majored in art at Yale, studied painting in Paris, moved to New York City, and married a magazine editor. The marriage lasted five years, and as she struggled through the aftermath of a painful divorce, Glass was diagnosed with cancer. Twelve days later, her beloved sister committed suicide.

Glass doesn't like to talk about that time, but writes about it eloquently and without a hint of sentimentality in an essay titled "I Have a Crush on Ted Geisel," published in Doubleday's Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes From the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Her cancer was caught early, and with her doctors' wary consent, she refused chemotherapy, which would have left her infertile. Two years later, Glass and her partner, museum photographer Dennis Cowley, had their first child, Alec.

Ecstatic with health and new motherhood, Glass resolved to start writing a novel. She was an accomplished short story writer, with many publications in literary journals and a run of prestigious awards, but at 40 she still pieced together a tenuous living as a freelance copy editor, business writer, and magazine journalist. "I was the 'promising' writer, always getting these wonderfully encouraging rejection letters from the New Yorker and the Atlantic," she says. In a juggling act known to all working mothers, Glass carved out odd slices of time "between money work and mother work" to write at the kitchen table of her family's tiny Greenwich Village apartment. Amid crayon drawings and business brochures, she completed a draft of Three Junes.

Glass's top-of-the-class freshman effort is constructed like one of the triptychs she admired as a young art student in Europe. In the first section, grieving Scots widower Paul McLeod travels to Greece, where he's transfixed by a young American painter named Fern. The second features Paul's son Fenno, a gay West Village bookseller. By the time the third June brings Fenno and Fern into contact via an elusive bisexual lover, the reader is gasping with awe at the rich textures and complex construction of Glass's big picture.

Glass and Cowley's second son, Oliver, was born the same month that her agent sold Three Junes. "Good Lord," Glass recalls a friend saying, "let's put you on the job of world peace." But personal peace, much less world peace, was not in the offing. Within a few months, as the author fine-tuned her manuscript for publication, she was diagnosed with a recurrence. This time she did accept chemotherapy.

The roots of a novel are often obscure, but Glass remembers exactly when she came up with the premise for The Whole World Over. "I had an MRI and CAT scan at Mount Sinai. They shoot you full of this glowing dye and you have to go away for two hours." While the dye circulated, Glass sat in Sarabeth's Kitchen and ordered a piece of cake. Then she took out the notebook she always carries, for everything from grocery lists to literary inspirations, and wrote a paragraph about a woman and a piece of cake that changed her life. "I thought about her baking that cake, who would eat it, what might happen between them. It's a variation on the old 'stranger comes to town' cliché: The stranger comes to town and orders dessert."