Still, Monday night's panel at New York's Society for Ethical Culture promised to be an exception. The theme was "So What Do I Do for An Encore?" and the panelists were five authors who had achieved the kind of success that most writers would kill for. Here, at last, was a likely occasion for authors to do something besides complain about their lot.

The event was ominously kicked off when Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the president of the Authors' Guild, the panel's sponsor, described people who write books as an "oppressed class." As the evening wore on, it became clear that anyone who'd shown up hoping to admire a glowing, happy pantheon of literary winners was out of luck. It seems that authors who can't reasonably gripe about their lack of financial or critical success will still find plenty of other things to complain about.

The panelists were introduced with all the kvelling of a grandmother at a high-end bar mitzvah -- just substitute the number of weeks spent on the New York Times Bestseller list for SAT scores. The evening's moderator, a genial if slightly distracted Frank McCourt, author of the almost universally beloved "Angela's Ashes" (117 weeks!) confessed at the start that this was his first moderating gig and that his wife had been bugging him all day to prepare for it, clearly to no avail.

McCourt introduced the panelists: Mitch Albom, author of the unstoppable inspirational title "Tuesdays with Morrie" (200 weeks!); Erica Jong, whose 1974 novel "Fear of Flying," McCourt said, "at one time blazed across the sky" (after reading it, McCourt confided, he "had to go to confession"); Mary Karr, who scored with her memoir "The Liar's Club" (67 weeks!); and James McBride, who hit the big time with his memoir "The Color of Water" (2 years!).

Albom was the first to detail the trials attendant on success, noting that after "Tuesdays With Morrie" he wasn't able to even start another book for two years. He had set out to write "Tuesdays" strictly as a "labor of love," he said, intending only to help pay some of Morrie's medical bills. At the time it seemed like a risk -- his agent warned him that the book would ruin his sportswriting career. When the book "became the book it became," Albom's crisis was only beginning. "There was demand for more. I resisted," he said, partly because he "hates the kind of self-help book that says, 'the secret to life is in the next book.'" He felt trapped, he said, by his own anti-sequel "heel-digging." "We're just now going to publishers with ideas for another book. It was a pretty paralyzing experience," he concluded.

Jong, who otherwise seemed intent on contradicting Albom for the entirety of the evening, concurred: An insidious writerly "paralysis" does indeed follow success. "You walk around Barnes & Noble hoping to be discovered," Jong said. "Then when it happens it's terrifying" Public acclaim, she insisted, offers constant distractions. It takes two years, she complained, to "unlist your phone number ... so that you can go back to your work." She, too, experienced a kind of shell-shock when she became a celebrity and was also unable to write again for some time. Worse yet, she felt "guilty for my success."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"