Their developing love affair is interrupted when a life-saving drill becomes the real thing. Everyone is lowered into small boats over the side of the ship — then hoping to be picked up by another ship. At the conclusion, Lively writes, "This never happened. Or rather, it did not happen to me . . . we went to Palestine."

Tricky author. The next story (and the book tends to project the feeling of a collection of short stories) of the eight here is titled "Albert Hall," when Lively was 18, and she is attending the Chelsea Arts Ball and falling in love with the 30-year-old man who brought her. The direction of the evening is becoming clear — and she knows she could be tempted to have sex with this man. But she doesn't; it turns out to be "just a heady rite of passage."

But what if it had been otherwise? The story that unfolds is about a girl named Miranda who marries at 18, has kids and feels cheated to have lost her youth so soon. She had intended to go to Oxford, but instead she becomes an unprepared mother who lacks the knowledge to help her daughter Chloe with her homework.

The last story is titled "Penelope," and she is "wise and good." But Helen, her cousin, is so beautiful that she is "the fairest woman that ever lived in the world." This calls to mind Helen of Troy, among the Greeks, with Ulysses, Achilles — and Penelope. But this Penelope is just as beautiful as Helen, and she can "turn princes into frogs and you can hear them croaking still in the reeds beside the river."

This story concludes what Lively calls "a confabulation" (a term Lively preferred to be the title of the book), which in psychiatric terms means "the creation of imaginary remembered experiences which replace the gaps left by disorders of the memory."

Lively's memory is not disordered — and her writing is mesmerizing.

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com