TALKING WITH ELLEN MEISTER

Write what you know: Ellen Meister of Jericho has taken

that advice to heart.

Living in a development within earshot of the Long Island Expressway, this

Island-bred mother of three (don't bother, she's not giving her age) is the

Long Island stereotype - or one version of it, at least. She's a fixture in her

local parent-teacher association, an itinerant minivan navigator (all the

better to get you to Hebrew school, my dear), and a consummate juggler of

dentist appointments, swim lessons and bake sales.

Now she's also an author: Meister's first novel, "Secret Confessions of the

Applewood PTA" (Morrow, $22.95), draws on her experiences in one-uppity

suburbia to explore the dreams and despairs behind Prada-clad facades.

Belying its pastoral name, Applewood is the kind of school district where

the median household income rivals the stock price for good gossip. Though

Meister - an advertising copywriter before motherhood struck - began working on

her novel long before "Desperate Housewives" drew the correlation between

white picket fences and hot sex, her novel has all the requisite potboiler

ingredients: infidelity, cat fights, celebrity and rollicking love scenes.

(Meister says her husband, a corporate bond analyst, was a bit taken aback by

the fervor of the latter; she mustered up the steamy passages believing that no

one would ever read them.)

"Everything in the book is fictional," stresses Meister, offering a

visiting reporter rugalach in her recently updated kitchen. ("It's very

prestigious to have a Dumpster in your driveway," she says airily of the local

culture, as the stainless-steel oven gleams nearby. "It means you're

renovating.") No one she knows is having a bodice-ripping love affair, she's

quick to add. Or if anyone is, she's not being told about it.

Meister knows her way around her school district. Max, 14, Ethan, 11, and

Emma, 8, are in high school, middle school and elementary school, respectively.

In spirit, if not in the precise nature of its characters' pecadillos,

"Applewood" is an imaginary riff on the Jericho School District, whose

reputation for academic performance is indicated by the name of its Web site,

bestschools.org. Drawing students from such moneyed enclaves as Muttontown and

Old Brookville, the school has its share of children whose cavernous homes, in

Meister's words, have you wondering, "Like, where's the gift shop?"

"In most communities, the church is the center of the community. But in

Jericho, it's the school," claims Meister, who admits to a few butterflies over

reactions to the book at this year's first PTA meeting. (Most people, she

says, were "warm and supportive.") One thing the book does is skewer the

over-the-top jostling in a hierarchy of volunteers whose fiefdoms are bake

sales and sweatshirt fund-raisers. In this social fishbowl, chairing the

"right" PTA committee is a matter of, if not life and death, certainly

prestige. Aside from the executive committee, Meister guesses that the most

sought-after post is the fashion-show committee. "There are a lot of size 2's

in this town," she says matter-of-factly.

"Applewood," sort of like Susan Isaacs on a Costco run, centers around a

trio of PTA moms who unite to pull off the ultimate one-up: arranging to have a

movie starring George Clooney filmed at their local elementary school.

Distracted by the project, each woman can forget her quotidian woes: ex-lawyer

Maddie's foundering marriage and the attentions of a recently resurfaced

college friend; Ruth's stroke-enfeebled husband and her guilt over her own

smoldering affair, and Lisa's humiliation because of her scene-stealing

alcoholic mother.

Unable to contact the movie star to get his permission to call her book

"George Clooney Is Coming to Applewood," Meister nonetheless sent him a copy,

inscribed, "This book just might put you on the map. You're welcome." No

response - yet. But at least Lisa Kudrow signed on to do the audiobook.

To put the Clooney coup in perspective, Meister recounts a story about

shrink-wrapped back-to-school supplies that her sister's PTA sold to parents

every September. "Furiously jealous" even as she stalked a Staples store

looking for divided notebooks and calculators, Meister wrote a cranky note to

her school principal asking why Jericho did not offer a similar perk. Next

thing she knew, she was chairing the new school-supply committee.

Dutifully, she organized, packaged and sold the back-to-school packets,

much to the delight of time-pressed parents. "I was a hero. That was my taste

of PTA fame," she says. "Now imagine what the reaction would be to bringing

George Clooney to town."

Meister's already at work on her next novel, another tale set

in suburbia, but with a grimmer premise. It's based on the real murder of a

pregnant woman whose mummified body was found three decades later in a steel

drum under the Jericho home of her former employer and presumed lover, who

subsequently hanged himself.

Who knew such secrets could lurk in suburbia - which is Meister's whole

point. When she first toyed with the idea of writing "Applewood," she went to a

PTA meeting - and couldn't stop wondering if anyone else harbored similar

hidden aspirations. "They don't know I have this inner life behind this smiling

PTA mom's face," she remembers thinking. "Everyone has something."

Even the car-pool set.