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Box 11749 • Memphis, TN 38111 ,0749 ve Sterling, the 30-year-old heroine of the comic novel Redeeming Eve, is a neurotic Jewish New Yorker with a chaotic life who is obsessed with 18th- century literature. She names her car Mr. Knightly and writes a thesis titled "Emma's Entitlement: Jane Austen's Feminist Role Models." She dreams of escaping the stress- ful demands of academia, mar- riage and motherhood. Mostly she wants to escape her overbear- ing Jewish mother, Maxie Sterling, b3 a television social worker who has taken maternal intrusive- ness to a new level by discussing her daughter Eve's fertility on her nationally syndicated television show, Mornings with Maxie. Over a recent cup of coffee in Greenwich Village, Nicole Bokat, the 41- year-old pretty and witty author of the funny first novel (Permanent Press; $24), insists that Redeeming Eve is purely fiction. Never mind that Bokat is a self- admitted neurotic Jewish New Yorker with a chaotic life who has a doctorate in literature and loves Jane Austen. Never mind that her own mother, Mona, recently tracked her down and had her paged at the radiologist's office as she was getting a mammo- gram, and calls her up to impart such advice as "It's un-American that your kids don't ride bikes." Or that Bokat gave birth to her second child at Long Island Jewish Hospital, where her mother is a neo-natal social worker. "My mother had just won some big fight with her supervisor at work. All these people kept coming into my room ro congratulate her," Bokat recalls, laughing. "I didn't know them. I'd just given birth. I was an morphine." So what did her mother think of her fictional debut? "She was insulted. "She said, 'You didn't put your brother in the book.' I said, 'Mom, it's fiction.' She said, 'I just hope your in- laws never see it.'" In the book, Eve's in-laws think the Susan Shapiro, a former resident of West Bloomfield, is a New York City- based freelance writer. meaning of being good Jews is "pulling out the electric menorah once a year and cleaning your mink for the High Holidays." Eve's mother-in-law, Norma, is described as looking like a cross between "Morticia" from The Addams Family and Jo Anne Worley from Laugh. In. Bokat, whose family name was origi- nally- "Bakatursky," grew up the oldest of three children in a Reform family in Great Neck, N.Y. Like Eve's father, Bokat's father (the late Peter Bokat) was a psychiatrist. Following in his footsteps, her younger sister is a psy- chiatric resident. Her brother is a sportswriter. Bokat was a good stu- dent who remembers hid- ing in her room, reading. She always wanted to be a writer. After majoring in English at Barnard, she completed her master's degree and doctorate at New York University in 1992. She admired such British and Irish authors as Austen, Edna O'Brien and Virginia Woolf, admitting she was attracted to "the Protestant restraint, the graceful and cerebral female char- acters who were not victims." Yet Bokat is also a fan of such Jewish authors as Alice Hoffman and Lynn Sharon Schwartz. As in Austen's work, Bokat grapples with struggles between the sexes and classes. In Redeeming Eve, Eve pines for her old boyfriend Graham, a rich WASP professor who idolized the big Johns: Updike and Cheever. Yet she winds up falling for a sweet, poor Jewish photog- rapher named Hart Goodman. Donning a Yiddish accent, Hart jokes, "I'm just a merchant-class Jew from the wrong side of Delancey Street. You smar- ty-pants Jews — with your big degrees and fancy addresses — always making us feel like real Yids." By marrying Hart, Eve winds up coming to terms with her roots. Bokat admits that, in real life, she once dated a rich WASP professor who idolized Updike and Cheever. Twelve years ago she married the sweet and Jewish Jay Lindell, a communications executive. They live, with their sons, 10-year-old Noah and 6- year-old Spencer, in Monclair, N.J. Juggling work, marriage and mother-