Wonderful life NYC writer Jim Sterba sails into Northeast Harbor reverie

When Jim Sterba opens the door at his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he shakes hands and immediately runs for the phone in another room. It’s a workday and he’s busy at his beat. As senior correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Sterba contributes magazine-style stories to the paper’s front page. His byline is most often associated with stories from foreign countries. Among other assignments in Asia, Sterba covered the Vietnam War and was bureau chief in Hong Kong for The New York Times.

These days, however, Sterba is carving a new place for himself in the world of letters. His recently published memoir, “Frankie’s Place: A Love Story,” is a book-length dispatch about his marriage to writer Frances Fitzgerald and her family’s summer place in Northeast Harbor.

The couple lives most of the year in New York City, where Sterba affably spoke about his career, the new book and his love for Maine. He wore a T-shirt, jeans, half glasses and was working in a dark green office with walls of posters from China and Vietnam. A lacquered bureau and huge brass urn filled with ancient-looking swords are testaments to his worldly travels.

Sterba’s large desk faces full bookshelves on one side and, on the other side, a window with an urban, eighth-floor view of rooftops and other windows. I’ve never been to the cabin he and Fitzgerald share on Mount Desert Island, but I suspect this scene in New York is about as different as you can get from what he sees when he stands in front of a window in Maine.

On the day we spoke, Sterba sipped coffee and sat casually on a sofa in his office. Occasionally, he jumped up to answer the phone or to check e-mail. Someone else might think of him as fidgety, but I recognized the restless habits of journalism, and it was a workday, after all.

Even though “Frankie’s Place” tells of a rural upbringing in the Midwest, I thought it was going to be hard picturing Sterba as someone who belongs in Maine. He’s New York. He’s delicatessens. He’s a jog around the reservoir in Central Park. Protective of this area when it comes to summer people (even though I am not a native), I was reluctant to endow Sterba with the ability to shift to a Maine sensibility. Would he be one of those smug visitors in search of the illusory “real Maine”? Ugh.

Forgive what may seem like blanket snobbery against New Yorkers coming to Maine in the summer. It’s a dismissive stance I’ve taken prior to reading any number of books that depict Maine as an Edenic retreat from the smog and smother of the city. When I read Sterba’s, I had a similar response. I knew the names, the places, the scenes he describes. And it was strange, once again, to see them all through the eyes of someone who has never weathered – and I do mean weathered – a winter here. Sterba is a summer visitor, and that’s clear in his book. So he started with strikes against him.

But I had to admit that something about the book won me over. When I suggested to him that it was the notion of a hard-core news writer transformed into middle-aged guy with nesting on his mind, Sterba threw up a hand in genial frustration. Everyone says that about the book, he admonished, and it wasn’t the response he was expecting.

“I didn’t see this as a love story,” he explained. “I thought it was a story about a summer in Maine, with a few war stories thrown in.”

Well, maybe. But mostly it’s a love story between two writers whose pasts are as different from one another as the East River is from Somes Sound.

How else might a reader see this underdog guy from Michigan who falls for a woman with deep American roots and a powerful reputation among writers as a serious heavy hitter in her field? She’s Peabody. She’s Pulitzer Prize. She really IS Northeast Harbor. But he won her heart, won the heart of a woman who had dated formidable men from her own background but never married until Sterba – romantic whether he likes it or not – grabbed her heart.

Yes, he says, the book is about that, but it is also about his reunion a decade ago with his father, who abandoned the family when Sterba was a young boy, and about his love of cooking (“Frankie’s Place” is also an informal cookbook interspersed with Sterba’s prose-style recipes for local Maine food).

The point, said Sterba, is a search for home. And in explaining himself, the romantic comes out. Watch.

“I’ve always loved nests,” he says. “I’m a Taurus. I like the woods. When I first went to Frankie’s place, it struck me as perfect. I had lived in a suitcase for so long. The combination of having traveled a lot and then finding this place in the woods – it was too good to be true. You appreciate the serenity, the nature, the simplicities.”

Frankie and Sterba met at a party in New York. Eventually, she invited him to visit her in Northeast Harbor. They hiked and jogged and wrote and ate lobster. Then she invited him again. They settled into a relationship, doing their work, exercising, entertaining friends in the Fitzgerald home on Somes Sound. After several years, atop Pemetic Mountain in Acadia National Park, he asked her to marry him.

“Frankie’s Place” recounts it all in a straightforward, often amused, sometimes sad tone. Sterba writes of the family Volvo getting dented and new residents digging up the earth near Fitzgerald’s place. Central to the book are Sterba’s own upheavals regarding his family life, his decision to leave the Times for the Journal, his diplomatic approach with the differences between his and his wife’s personalities, the history of the island and the local figures who inhabit it year round.

“I know how to write newspaper stories,” Sterba said. “I know how to write for The Wall Street Journal. But I didn’t know how to write this. I had to force myself kicking and screaming. Every journalist says: I’ll show you, I’m going to write a book. But we delude ourselves. This was hard. But I’m happy I went through the process, and it gives me confidence about doing it again.”

Fitzgerald helped, of course. She read the manuscript – “She’s a tyrant with a pencil,” Sterba said – as did several friends early on.

As we were talking, Sterba received an e-mail from a book agent in New York City. He stopped talking, or at least mostly stopped, to read the message, which he read aloud: “I’m wild about the book.” Sterba beamed.

Fitzgerald, apparently, was not in the apartment that day. Sterba didn’t say where she was, and I didn’t ask. I told Sterba that I wish the book had more about his life, about his early years in Michigan working on a farm, about his mean stepfather and the other women in his life.

But it always comes back to Frankie.

“She made me feel very comfortable,” he said about their early days together. “She was very helpful. I feel more comfortable around her than anyone. She’s my best friend and she’s really good at being friends. One of the great things that keeps me going is when I hear her in there working.”

Sterba revealed at the end of our talk that the book was his answer to a summer project that would allow him to blend into Fitzgerald’s strict schedule of daily exercise, work and friends, but mostly work. They are both athletic, but Sterba gets distracted more easily and, like all good reporters, appreciates a snappy digression. Writing the book with a local setting allowed him to linger over conversations with Mainers, to spend time in the library, to indulge his sense of summer life and trumpet the treasures of the landscape and seascape, even as they are being encroached upon by a new breed of summer people.

“I’m for the black flies, the fog and the mosquitoes – all the things that repress real estate values,” said Sterba about his tract on Maine. “I don’t want to be a bad guy. I don’t want people to say, hey, there goes the neighborhood. Obviously, I wouldn’t have written the book if I didn’t want people to like me. ”

After more than an hour, Sterba stood to see me out. He had cleared away the coffee and was eyeing his computer. Our time was over. He shook my hand again at the door and said with a smile: “Now I know what it’s like to be on this end of the interview.”

And he was off, back to his computer, ready for a trip to a weekend rental outside of New York City and eventually to Maine. He doesn’t keep his suitcase packed like he used to in the old days. But, of course, now he has Frankie’s place to call home.