"I am always someone who follows the research more than my self-interest. It certainly has not been in my self-interest to defend men. I've gone from being quite wealthy, when I was defending women, to being quite poor defending men. I don't have children that I've lost in a bitter custody dispute. But I see an enormous wound in kids due to a lack of their dads. The word of the day is blinding us to what we could otherwise see, and that is what drives me to write."

As it turns out, I am probably not the best interviewer for Warren Farrell. He has complained in the past that publications repeatedly send young women to interview him (a ploy that must have been particularly entertaining for editors around the time of his last book, which, among other things, claimed a man's sex drive is his greatest point of vulnerability, which puts him in particular danger when forced to interact with young, attractive women on a professional basis).

What's more, I am a single mother, though Farrell, who is nothing if not open-minded, does not seem to hold that against me. (He does claim, however, that censorship from a single mother-editor at Simon & Schuster caused him to switch to Tarcher-Putnam for "Reunion.") He relays a brief history of his relationship with his last woman-friend, a divorced mother, which flourished despite the fact that she is a born-again Christian and he is an atheist. He says that making love to a mother is so much better, because a mother is a woman who has been "humbled" by motherhood, and brings an entire "tapestry" to lovemaking.

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To find Farrell I go to Pleasanton, Calif., a Bay Area bedroom community that is indeed pleasant in the suburban sense. At the end of two very long, very non-pedestrian-friendly blocks, across a four-lane highway, at the end of a very long strip mall that contains a Wal-Mart, is the Borders bookstore that will host Farrell this evening.

Farrell is an amiable, round, bearded man who, a Borders employee points out, looks something like the actor Sir Derek Jacobi. He's dressed in a denim shirt and denim jeans and is already on a first-name basis with his audience. They form a ring around him -- two couples, one with a baby; three men accompanied by neither woman nor child; and one man with his son -- in plastic chairs, swapping stories, comparing the relative differences in family law between Alameda and Santa Clara counties, interrupting each other in their eagerness to lay their lives bare before their mentor, a man they seem certain will not only understand them but fight for them as well.

In fact, the woman with the baby has already spoken with Farrell, having worked her way through the call queue on a radio show that hosted him this morning. (According to Farrell, the host had to place a moratorium on calls from "angry men," who flooded the phone lines with their personal tales of custody woes.) She is a second wife, a position Farrell holds in particularly high esteem, because, according to him, the second wife is the single most important asset a man can have when it comes time to duke it out with the ex-wife in gynocentric family court. Farrell praises her intelligence and she beams. "I'm not one of those defensive women," she says.

Her husband worked as a Y2K programmer last year, which, she says, explains why this year, the amount of child support he is required to pay should be lowered. "And do you know what she said in court? She tried to paint him as a Y2K lunatic!"

Another Farrell fan, a man dressed in a worn suit and wearing thick glasses with a vaguely aviator cast, nods solemnly. "There are a lot of war stories out there," he says, and proceeds to share his own with the group. He can't even go to church because his church happens to be located across the street from his children's elementary school and his ex happens to have a restraining order that prevents him from going within a certain distance from the school.

He says that his wife was a career woman during the first two years of their marriage, while he stayed at home with the children. Then they divorced. Now his oldest son is 13 and he hasn't seen his children in 10 years. He's trying to sue his wife's attorneys in civil court, and has a bewildering theory that somehow he can prosecute someone -- whether it's the ex-wife or the attorneys or the child support collection bureau is unclear -- under RICO, the statute designed to prevent racketeering. He's trying to start a fathers' rights group and he's brought his business cards, which he begins to pass around the group.

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