Social Studies

Amy Lincoln, the Harvard-educated star reporter in Susan Isaacs' new novel, Any Place I Hang My Hat (Scribner), has nowhere to go but up. Her father Chicky was in and out of prison, her mother Phyllis abandoned her as an infant, and Grandma Lil was known to shoplift dinner on her way home. Why did the author choose such a steep mountain for her heroine to climb? "I'm kind of interested in social class, which we're not supposed to have, but of course we do," says Isaacs. "We're such a mobile society — upwardly, downwardly and geographically."

Isaacs, 60, has hopped up the social ladder herself. When she wrote her first book, Compromising Positions, she was a housewife in Long Island, N.Y. That novel began her nine-book best-seller streak. Her fiction has since been translated into 30 languages, and two of her books have been made into films. Isaacs allows that her success has brought some changes. "The lifestyle got better and offered enormous opportunities, including not doing my own laundry," she says. But Isaacs, who still has an unmistakable New York accent, has stayed put on Long Island. "I see everything out there," she confides.

Isaacs' personal life has been a piece of cake compared with her protagonist's. In addition to being a novelist, she has worked as a political speechwriter and a screenwriter. Isaacs has been happily married to white-collar-criminal defense attorney Elkan Abramowitz for 36 years. He was a hit with her family from day one, says the author. "They adored my husband. My maternal grandmother said, 'You've got someone from the Ivory League!'"