AUTHOR DRAWS ON MODELING EXPERIENCE IN NEW STORIES.

Byline: Michael Kenny Boston Globe

Two of the stories in "Emerald City," Jennifer Egan's new collection of short stories, are about fashion models. It is something she knows about but has acknowledged only very recently. "I lived in terror," she said, "of being just known as the ex-model who wrote stories."

But in a roundabout sort of way, the modeling experience turned her toward writing. "I felt a desire to vanish and to speak - the two things you can't ever do as a model," Egan said while in Boston to read from the collection.

"But I was as ill-suited to it as Stacey," she said, referring to the going-nowhere model in the title story of the "Emerald City" collection.

Egan, 33, lives in New York and is married to David Herskovits, a director of experimental plays. She modeled during the year between high school in San Francisco and college at the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in English (after a brief flirtation with archeology) and began to write. She explained that she was "desperate" to spend that year traveling "but all I had was a job at an ice cream store. Modeling was the only thing I could think of doing that would make it possible."

Possible, she admits, because she had the height (5 feet 9 inches) and "the basic bone structure." Fifteen years later, with the shoulder-length ash-blond hair, an alabaster skin that reveals the architectural tracery beneath and a certain "freeze-frame" way of focusing a listener's attention on a point she wishes to make, she might find it still possible.

As it was, after six months of modeling, Egan had enough money to buy a backpack and a standby ticket to London. With much painful pruning and rewriting, that summer of traveling around Europe became her first novel, "The Invisible Circus," acclaimed after being published last year. It came out in paperback this month.

The trip that the 18-year-old Phoebe takes in "The Invisible Circus" in search of clues to an older sister's suicide "was actually my trip," said Egan - except for the suicide bit.She landed in New York City eight years ago, following graduate school at Cambridge and travels to central Asia and China - which produced an autobiographical story, "Why China?," one of several in the collection originally published in the New Yorker. With the novel temporarily on hold - "It was 800 pages and beyond hideous," she said - Egan turned to short stories, selling three within a year's time to the New Yorker, New England Review and the Boston-based literary magazine Ploughshares.

Egan did not publicly acknowledge that she was once a model until making a brief reference to it - "for purposes of full disclosure" - in a nonfiction piece on a 16-year-old potential superstar model in The New York Times Magazine this month.That article was also Egan's first venture into nonfiction. While there was her own long-ago experience to give her an insight into "the exquisite urgency" of high-fashion modeling, Egan also drew on the deeper experience of her troubled teen-age years growing up in post-Haight-Ashbury San Francisco to find "tolerance" for a young model's often drug-sustained world.

Egan said that model James King, the teen-age model who strikes readers of the article as a lost child, "confronted" her after the story appeared, wanting to know "Why couldn't you show my life as a success?" Half agreeing, Egan said that James - the model's professional name - "is so tough that when you are around her she seems less sad than she does on paper."

After a very visible year of book-touring first with the novel and then with the story collection, Egan said she feels again that "desire to vanish and to speak" that steered her into writing in the first place. The new project will draw on "smudged realism" of police work - her grandfather was a Chicago chief of detectives - "the opposite," she said, "of that glitzy world I also know."