By David Mehegan, Globe Staff, 3/12/2003

EW YORK -- Nothing about novelist Julia Glass's personal story is typical.

The Massachusetts native broke nearly every literary convention on her way to winning the 2002 National Book Award for ''Three Junes,'' her first novel. She didn't start writing at a young age, had no novelist friends, and never took a writing course. She wrote ''Three Junes'' without an outline, showed her manuscript to no one until she was finished, and -- perhaps most startling -- bagged a major-league award on her first try.

Over a recent lunch at Les Deux Gamins, a French restaurant in her West Village neighborhood, Glass, 46, described her improbable path from Lincoln, Mass., to her place in the literary limelight. Brisk and confident, she seems the very picture of a New York author. But it's clear that as an artist she always heard a different drummer, and any impression that she has had it easy would be much mistaken.

The oldest of two sisters, Glass moved with her family from Belmont to Lincoln in 1965, she says, so her mother could keep a horse (her parents still live there). As a child, she was a book lover, even if not intent on a writer's career. From fourth grade through high school, she worked in the Lincoln Public Library.

''That was Shangri-la to me,'' she says. ''I would check out plays, go out in the woods where no one could hear me, and read all the parts aloud.''

Though she loved books, she loved art more. At Yale in 1974, Glass was an art major and took few literature courses. ''I'm a slow reader,'' she says; she did not want to read several long novels a week, obligatory for an English major. After graduating summa cum laude in 1978, she spent a year in Paris on a painting fellowship.

''In my mind, I always thought I would settle in Massachusetts,'' she says. ''I loved Cambridge, so I came back and got a job working on an archeological dig [run by the Fogg Museum] that was going on in Turkey. I had a room on Buckingham Street, and the office was in the attic of Busch-Reisinger Museum. I would go up in that little bell tower and work, and at night and on weekends I would paint.''

The university setting ''was lovely and civilized,'' she says, but its stuffy atmosphere turned her away from academic life. Most of her Yale friends had gone to New York, and in the early 1980s, she moved there and began work as a freelance writer and copy editor. She settled in the West Village, got married, and eventually got a full-time editor's job at Cosmopolitan magazine. She painted and read constantly: Shakespeare, Joyce, Austen, and George Eliot. She was awed, especially, by Eliot's ''Daniel Deronda.''

''The characters are incredible, the writing is beautiful, and the structure is extraordinary,'' she says. ''I thought, `This is what I want to do: I'm going to write stories.' '' In the mid-1980s, she began to write, ''feeling guilty that I was using time that I should have spent painting.'' In time, reluctantly, she put her brushes away to concentrate on writing.

Then came what she calls ''the triple whammy.''

In 1991, her marriage ended painfully (soon afterward, she and photographer Dennis Cowley became a couple, and they have two young sons). In December 1992, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and 12 days later, her brilliant, high-achieving younger sister, Carolyn, committed suicide. In the midst of that crushing loss, Glass underwent radiation therapy, followed by major surgery in 1993. (She had what she calls a ''local and superficial'' recurrence in 2000, followed by chemotherapy.)

''The writer John Dufresne says fiction is only about trouble,'' Glass says, ''and you can't write about trouble if you haven't had it in your own life. I wrote a few autobiographical stories about my sister's death, but I put them aside. If you're going to write about traumatic experiences, you have to let them sit for a while. What mattered to me was to write about what it's like to go through incredible grief and inconsolable heartbreak. How do we live richly beyond heartbreak that we know can never be cured? It's like having glass splinters in your hand that always hurt even if you can't see them.''

In 1993, she won the Nelson Algren Award for her first published story, ''Collies,'' and she eventually sold other stories and won other awards. A couple of agents contacted her and suggested she try a novel. At first she had misgivings -- she was a short-story writer, and a solitary one at that. But then a friend gave her a shove.

''Stop whining and do it,'' Glass recalls him saying. ''Just write a novel. Of course you can do it.'' She went back to ''Collies,'' about a grieving Scottish widower traveling in Greece and a young woman he befriends, and it grew into ''Three Junes.'' The main character, Fenno McLeod, the widower's son, is a gay bookseller in Greenwich Village who cares for a friend dying of AIDS and is faced with an extraordinary request by his family in Scotland. The novel is not autobiographical, Glass says, but ''the three main characters are all manifestations of grief, all coping with great regrets.''

Though she knew narrative point of view was daring, Glass kept her work-in-progress to herself.

''I was writing from a gay man's point of view,'' she says, ''and there was an aspect of political correctness hanging over me. I lived in terror that the `lit police' were going to come in and handcuff me and take me downtown, or that no one could possibly take me seriously.''

She needn't have worried. Editor Deborah Garrison, who bought the novel for Pantheon Books, took it very seriously as soon as she began to read it. ''There was something beautifully transparent about the writing,'' Garrison says, ''a symphonic texture to it. It's full of lived experience, a tenderness toward those crucial moments in life when joy comes out of pain. It was clearly not a book by a 23-year-old.''

Reviews were mostly, if not unanimously, favorable. Some critics felt the book didn't hang together, that the first part, based on ''Collies,'' was stronger than the later parts. Even so, with 150,000 copies in print, the book has been a hit, and it appears in paperback next month.

While the prize alone didn't accelerate book sales, it helped, and within months ''Three Junes'' propelled Glass from unknown upstart into elite literary circles. For the first time in her life, Glass was meeting and talking shop with the writers she admires: Richard Russo, Peter Cameron, Dufresne, Jim Harrison, Stewart O'Nan, Margot Livesey. The award also ensured an answer for the most anxious question new novelists face: ''Can I find a publisher for my next book?''

Some writers would find Glass's situation a little fearsome; after all, you have to write that next book knowing that expectations will be high. That pressure is real, Glass says, yet she is already at work and fending off distractions. She's had to let the phone ring, and say ''no'' more often than she used to.

''I will have to be better organized,'' she says. ''Winning an award is galvanizing in a way, to have judges say you're this good. It gives you a certain amount of drive.''

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.

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