In Listening for Madeleine, Leonard S. Marcus's oral biography of writer Madeleine L'Engle just issued in paperback, an interviewee tells an anecdote about moving from Washington, D.C., to the small town of Goshen, Connecticut, where the cow-to-person ratio was one to one. Going into Goshen General Store, the attorney from D.C. finds the grocer's wife behind the counter reading Proust and thinks to herself, “Aha! There is more here [in Goshen] than meets the eye.”

The woman behind the counter reading Proust was L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time and dozens of other books. Born a “poor-little-not-quite-rich-girl” in New York City to parents who seemed to have enjoyed socializing with the likes of George Gershwin more than raising their daughter, L'Engle grew up in boarding schools in places like Charleston, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, when she wasn't at home being ignored by her folks.

By the time she got to Goshen, she'd tried acting herself, married actor Hugh Franklin, published one book (The Small Rain), and had a daughter, Josephine. In Goshen, L'Engle recruited people to sing in the Goshen Players and helped put on amateur musicals, was heavily involved in the church, and had a writing studio nicknamed "The Tower" above the garage.

This was all before the publication of Wrinkle, and at the time, L'Engle was receiving rejection after rejection, struggling to put out another book, and was considering quitting. As her daughter Josephine puts it, “She had put the cover on the typewriter and declared, 'No more!'” But after only a few days of her mother's life as a former writer, Josephine implored her to return to her craft. “When she wasn't writing, and especially when she wasn't being published, she was very depressed.”

Listening for Madeleine doesn't shy from detailing L'Engle's self-doubt, her shortcomings as a mother, her sometimes grandiose opinion of herself, or her children's feelings about having their lives used as source material. The idealized version of her family that L'Engle has presented in many of her books, some of which purport to be nonfiction, doesn't sit well with her children, who still have to explain that they are not the characters her mother created.

But the book is also not as harsh on L'Engle as an oft-referenced 2004 New Yorker profile may have been, and it achieves a portrait of the author that conveys her complexity, her difficulties, and some of the wonder that inevitably accompanies the persona of a writer of such imaginative fiction. Meeting a somewhat eccentric woman behind the counter at a small town grocery store reading Proust, you wouldn't expect her to be perfect. But you'd probably be interested in getting to know her.