WASHINGTON -- Melissa Bank finishes reading an excerpt from her new book, "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing," and looks out at the small-but-rapt audience hanging onto her every word despite the lunch-time din of Olsson's Books. It's time to take questions, she knows. But she also knows no one ever wants to ask the first question.

So she starts. "Am I Jane?" she says of her main character, who links most of the stories in this collection. "I'm not."

Yes, she is a witty, 30-ish, single New Yorker who has worked in advertising and Jane Rosenal is a witty, 30-ish etc., etc., etc. But what begins in truth and autobiography will take on its own reality, especially if you work and re-work the material. Bank became Jane while writing, she had to. But she's not Jane, and Jane's not her.

Her audience nods and smiles fondly at her. They still have no questions. This is not typical of Bank's book tour to date, where audience members have pressed close and shared confidences, sure they know her in the flesh because they know her on the page. In Madison, Wis., a woman mentioned she was recently divorced. "How's it going?" Bank asked. "Well, you know," the woman replied, as if Bank was the authority on being single.

But this audience is so quiet, so shy. Well, Bank asks herself, which authors does she read? Nick Hornby, Pam Houston and, most recently, Edmund White. Who were her influences? F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Unusual, she thinks, for a woman.

Finally, someone has a question. You, sir, there, in the third row.

"Why did you write this book?" the man asks.

She is nonplussed, and one does not have to know Bank well to realize she is seldom at a loss for words. The last part threw her. Why did you write this book?

"Why? Why?" she says at last. "I have no idea. I just sat down night after night and this is what came out."

It seems a rather self-deprecating description of "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing," given what has happened to Bank over the past 18 months. "What came out" was Jane Rosenal, a character who has critics sounding like lovesick swains. "What came out" was a series of related short stories that sold for $275,000, an extraordinary sum for a first work of fiction. "What came out" was a book now in its seventh printing, for a total of 145,000 copies in a month. "What came out" was a book that hit the New York Times best seller list Sunday, and will be on it next week as well.

Later, as Bank settles down in the cigarette-friendly lobby of the Willard Hotel, she ponders why the question stopped her. She wears a short, becoming sun dress that exposes her arms and legs, very tanned and very cut from weight workouts. A bellboy passing through the lobby can barely conceal his admiration. "Look at those gastros," he says, referring to the gastrocnemius, calves to the rest of us. "She must do some workout, huh?"

Bank, 38, already fatigued by the demands of her tour, seems oblivious to his attention, to say nothing of his gastros. She's still thinking about the soft-spoken man at the bookstore, whose question caught her off-guard.

"I loved it, because it was a different question, and I'm already at the point where no one asks an unexpected question," she says. "But I have no idea how this book came out."

Inspiration

But there is, in fact, another, simpler way to answer the question. Bank wrote "The Girls' Guide" because Francis Ford Coppola asked her to.

Three years ago, the director started Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary quarterly designed as an outlet for new writers. The magazine also serves as a proving ground for short fiction that could be adapted to film.

Most of the stories are original, explains editor Adrienne Brodeur. But each issue also features a commissioned piece, in which a chosen writer develops a story based on one of Coppola's ideas.

In 1997, Coppola was intrigued by the buzz surrounding "The Rules," a best-selling dating guide that resurrected the kind of mind games that most women had abandoned. Brodeur, familiar with Bank's work from small literary journals, asked her to try writing a story about a woman who is using a similar guide. Only this woman falls in love with her prey.

Coppola, via e-mail, says of the process: "Normally, when you give a writer a commission, you hope that they will run with it and make it their own, with only a slight basis in what you originally suggested. You expect that. I provided the original concept and Adrienne worked closely with Melissa, but ultimately it is the writer who brings the idea to life and creates the magic."

Brodeur worried the story might be cynical, but "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing" turned out to be a sweet and cautiously optimistic piece. Bank also proved to be someone Brodeur wanted for a friend.

"I fell in love with her as well as her writing," she says. "She walks on water in my book."

After Zoetrope published the story, several agents began pursuing Bank, asking to see the rest of her work. But Bank, who once worked as an assistant in the literary office of Aaron M. Priest, found herself recalling how much she liked Priest's partner, Molly Friedrich.

So she sent the manuscript to Friedrich, with a self-deprecating postcard. "I think it said something like, 'I wish this were finished. I also wish I was 5-9 and had the love of a good man." (Bank is two inches shy of the first goal, and politely discreet about how close she has been to the second.)

Friedrich, whose roster of clients is notable for literary best sellers such as Frank McCourt and Jane Smiley, wasn't surprised Bank had been writing fiction in her spare time. After all, Bank had left the agency to study writing in Cornell University's master of fine arts program. She had returned to New York to work as a copywriter, yet continued to write fiction at night.

"People who gravitate to publishing do so for a couple of reasons, one of which is they're interested in publishing," Friedrich says. "So it doesn't altogether surprise you [that they have a manuscript]. What surprises you is when their yearning turns out to be a good manuscript."

She thought "The Girls' Guide" was better than good and quickly sent it out to 10 carefully chosen editors. (However, Friedrich dismisses a New York Times column that says she intentionally sent the book to women only, saying it was a coincidence.)

Within 24 hours, Viking had signed the book.

Viking vice president and editor-at-large Carole DeSanti worked on "The Girls' Guide" with Bank, and the two became close friends. (This seems to be a pattern with Bank, who dedicated her book to Brodeur, DeSanti, Friedrich and three other women, whom she describes as "my real-life girl guides.")

"She works harder than any author I've ever met," says DeSanti. "She's devoted to the job of making her work as good as it can be, and I happen to be an insane, demanding perfectionist, so we were a good match."

A charmed life

There is only so much an insane, demanding perfectionist can do, however. Eventually, "The Girls' Guide" had to make its way into the world, where any number of potential catastrophes waited: bad reviews, bad covers, bad timing.

But the book has enjoyed what Friedrich calls "a near-perfect publication." And editor DeSanti praises Bank for her transition from book author to book "diplomat," agreeing to do almost anything asked of her to promote "The Girls' Guide." (Besides, Viking publisher Barbara Grossman is caring for Bank's beloved Labrador, Maybelline, while Bank is on the road. So, Bank jokes, she has extra incentive to do whatever the publisher wants.)

But so many of the questions are the same, and so many feel intrusive. Is she Jane? Does she have a brother? Did she have cancer? Who's the older man that Jane dates, the famous editor-writer? Bank is learning to draw certain lines, and does so with such good-natured charm that an interviewer may not realize until later how many questions were deflected.

"People feel because they read the book, they know me," Bank said. They don't. They might not even know Jane.

She has finished a draft of a screenplay for Coppola based on her book and has started a novel, which she is too superstitious to discuss. Is there any downside to her success? Bank has a ready answer.

"Being successful is like being in training for being a jerk," she says. "You're treated as though you're really important. The focus is all on you, the pictures are of you. But if you think about it, the happiest moments are when you lose yourself and you're outside your head."

A few minutes later, she asks: "Did that sound jerky?"

Did it sound jerky to talk about the fear of being jerky?

She smiles, sees the humor in this, sees it's not particularly jerky, although it is very Jane-like.

A few weeks ago, she did decide to treat herself to a shopping trip to Bergdorf's and Barney's, to buy whatever she wanted, and not worry whether it was on sale.

"There wasn't anything, I didn't find anything," she mock laments. But this is the way life works. When you're broke, and you can't afford what you want, you think you want everything you see through the shop windows.

Flush, you need much less. So it's back to square one, to the items enumerated in that postcard Bank sent to Friedrich: The desire for two extra inches, the love of a good man, and the next manuscript that you work on until, maybe, it's finished.

Pub Date: 6/22/99