ENTERTAINMENT

Oklahoman Teresa Miller brings some much-needed credibility back to the memoir genre with Means of Transit. Despite its subtitle, A Slightly Embellished Memoir, Ms. Miller's reminiscences about her life in the Northeastern Oklahoma town of Tahlequah (with occasional jaunts to Tulsa and the "cities" of Oklahoma and New York) ring truer than just about anything I've read this year.

Ms. Miller's writing is as sweetly unembellished as the red Okie plains. Her dead-on storyteller instincts were honed through writing two novels (many years apart, as Means of Transit relates), as well as stints in journalism and acting.

She has a wicked eye for amusing, telling detail, as when she reveals that although her family wholeheartedly endorsed shows such as Queen for a Day, Secret Storm and The Mod Squad, the one show they would not let her watch was The Waltons. "Grandma believed that we were such a quirky family ourselves that tuning in to the well-balanced Walton clan might give us unrealistic expectations," she writes.

Means of Transit, although mostly amusing, also delves into Ms. Miller's darker family skeletons: her father's womanizing, her mother's death, her brother's drug abuse and arrest, and her physical and mental abuse at the hands of her stepmother and a stalker.

The last part of the book is a blithe rendering of her life when it finally straightened out, as she found her niche as a writing teacher and founded the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers. A local TV show featuring author interviews let her meet and get advice from her literary idols.

And if Ms. Miller couldn't bring the Waltons to Oklahoma via TV, she brought them in person. Series creator Earl Hamner Jr. spoke at the center's book festival one year, and she got to hear him say those immortal words: "Goodnight, everyone."Means of Transit

A Slightly Embellished Memoir

Teresa Miller

(University of Oklahoma, $24.95) Plan your life

Teresa Miller will sign Means of Transit at 7 p.m. Friday at Legacy Books, 7300 Dallas Parkway.