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Inside a Brookhaven home, identical 2 1/2-year-olds Edward and George have just woken up from their afternoon naps.

George is grouchy, but Edward smiles like a prince.

Charlotte B. Teagle/Staff (ENLARGE)
Photos by CHARLOTTE B. TEAGLE/Staff (ENLARGE)
Author Emily Giffin (right) talks with Sloane Alford (from left), Mike Space and Michelle Fuller at a recent speaking and book-signing engagement at the Margaret Mitchell House.
(ENLARGE)
The lucky life of Emily Giffin, author of "Something Borrowed" and "Something Blue," includes twins Edward (in chair) and George.
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"George woke up on the wrong side of the crib," their mother, Emily, apologizes, sounding just like any other young mother trying to get her children to behave in front of company.

The boys' mommy, however, is not just any young metro Atlanta mother. She is best-selling author Emily Giffin, 34, creator of characters so real and so enthrallingly flawed that people sometimes forget that they are fictional.

"I bought her first book and read it in two days, staying up until 2 in the morning to finish it," said Deanna Cromer, 36, of Atlanta. "She gets at people and their insecurities and then tells the other side of the story. You can't wait to hear more about them."

Work for Giffin is in an attic room with sunlit windows and treasured artwork — from the twins, who play downstairs under the guidance of their nanny while their mother creates characters and story lines rich in relationships gone awry.

"People are always asking, 'What is Darcy going to do next?' or 'How's Rachel?' " Giffin said. "My dad thinks Darcy and Rachel live in my basement, he asks about them so much."

Captivating characters

The characters seem so real because they are so real, Giffin's fans say.

Everyone knows a Darcy — the beautiful woman who collects men like charms and must be the center of attention, even at a birthday party she throws for her best friend.

Everyone knows a Rachel — the overachiever good girl, simmering and suffering under the patina of respectability. For just once, she'd like to outshine Darcy. Or simply do something bad.

And of course, everyone knows — and dreads — a Dex. The good-looking, chiseled-features, privileged man with everything, the kind of man you avoid unless you've got nerves of steel or the ego of the Empress Josephine.

While Darcy, Rachel, Dex and others live in Giffin's mind and not her cellar, the characters have stretched out and made themselves cozy in the minds of thousands of others, too.

One of the things readers seem to like most about Giffin's characters is learning that good people can do bad things — and be forgiven and forgive. They also like the way she has reversed the points of view, telling a story first from Rachel's point of view in "Something Borrowed," then flipping that for "Something Blue" and letting Darcy have her say.

"I like how she can put a spin on a story and make you empathize with characters even though you may not like what they do," said Cameron Sherrill of Atlanta. Fans like Sherrill have helped catapult "Something Borrowed," Giffin's debut novel, published in 2004; "Something Blue," her second; and her recently released "Baby Proof" to national acclaim. And Giffin has optioned film rights to "Something Borrowed"; a screenplay is in the works.

Giffin, with translucent aqua eyes, long blond hair and a size-2 figure, isn't shy about admitting that her characters are often drawn from her own experience in addition to her imagination.

Rachel, for example, the narrator in "Something Borrowed," is a hardworking, straight-A, summa cum laude graduate with a law degree and a job she hates in a big New York City law firm.

That was Giffin, to some degree. The daughter of a Sears executive and a librarian made it through Wake Forest University without the blemish of even one B. She was accepted to Harvard and the University of Virginia law schools. She chose Virginia, to stay in the Atlantic Coast Conference, because of her love of basketball.

After law school, she moved to Manhattan, which she loved, and she practiced law, which she hated.

Unlike Rachel, Giffin never had an affair with her best friend's fiancé, as Rachel does with Dex.

The idea behind the characters and the story line just seemed a natural, Giffin said. All women want their best friends and boyfriends to get along — but just not too well, Giffin said. And what more common fear is there among friends and lovers than a friend and fiancé getting along too well? And don't many women have emotional conflict about another woman if she's too pretty?

"She just seems to be able to put into words stuff you always felt," said Sherrill.

Fans said they like Giffin's insight into the full spectrum of emotions involved in real relationships — loyalty, perfidy, anger, forgiveness.

It is that emotional mining of relationships that Giffin herself enjoys about writing, she said.

"Oh, absolutely, that's what I like most about writing," Giffin said. "The relationships — husband-wife, mother-daughter — what's beautiful and what's complicated about them. That's what life is all about. You have what you do, but life is really the sum of your relationships."

Connecting with people

Her fascination with the complexities of relationships also may be one of the most interesting parts about Giffin, who appears, at least superficially, so immune to the vicissitudes of life.

She's the first to acknowledge that she's led a lucky life.

She has one sister, Sarah, who also has twin boys (9 months older than hers). The two — and their four children — are very close. Emily Giffin is also close to both parents, who are divorced, but considers her mother a best friend.

Giffin is starry-eyed still for husband Buddy Blaha, president of corporate development at Atlanta-based Newell Rubbermaid, whom she met on an airplane to Charlottesville, Va., for a football game.

The family's home is spacious and informal yet meticulously kept, with flowers blooming and the grass lush even on a fiery hot and dry August day.

As you walk up the steps, framed by soft pink crape myrtles, you just want to hate the people who live in this picture-perfect place.

Then a gorgeous Emily Giffin comes to the door, and even if you tried, you couldn't find one thing about her to dislike.

She's disarmingly natural, self-deprecating, genuine. She talks about a zit on her chin that won't go away. It seems inconsistent. Aren't good writers supposed to work in cramped, darkened dumps instead of in a dormered sanctuary? And mustn't they be tortured by something other than a pimple?

Giffin's work proves not, apparently. In her mind, all that matters is a desire to write, to tell a story about people and their relationships.

She's had that since she was a preschooler.

"She was always so interested in adults," said Giffin's mother, Mary Ann Elgin, who lives in a Chicago suburb but plans to move to Atlanta soon. "As a kindergartner, she'd follow our next-door neighbor around when he'd be doing yardwork, and ask him all kinds of questions — who do you think is better looking, my dad or Mr. So-and-So?"

Sarah Giffin thinks Emily's gift for writing comes from an "uncanny ability to connect with people.

"She still writes to our nursery school teacher, Miss Jane. In fact, she still remembers the names of all of her nursery school classmates. She'll ask me, 'What do you think Deidre Phillips is up to these days?' When I ask who Deidre Phillips is, she'll remind me that Deidre is the bossy girl we knew at age 3 that used to carry around a Curious George doll," Sarah wrote in an e-mail after a telephone interview.

Emily wrote in a journal every day not long after she left nursery school. As she moved into elementary school, she also wrote books and plays. Neighborhood children often performed the plays at the Giffin home.

The biggest hit was "The Day the Mothers Ran Away," Elgin remembered.

But Emily was not only precocious and creative. She was driven and very hardworking.

Sarah, who is only 14 months older than Emily, remembers being embarrassed by her sister as they grew into adolescence. Sarah, a Goth in high school, thought Emily was a hopeless geek.

"She did homework on Saturday mornings," said Sarah Giffin, who now lives in Milwaukee.

A long love of storytelling

At a recent reading at the Center for Southern Literature at the Margaret Mitchell House, Giffin told her fans that her latest book, "Baby Proof," gave her the opportunity to explore another complicated relationship — that of husband and wife when the wife doesn't want a child but the husband has decided he does. "I tried to think of, is there ever a deal-breaker when it comes to true love?" Giffin said.

She is quick to say how much she loves Edward and George and how she has never regretted having children — and that this story line, too, certainly doesn't come from her own life.

And yet, once again, the idea behind the story is a complicated and unexpected turn in a relationship — that may or may not ruin the relationship.

Those who have known Giffin for years believe the author will keep weaving the complexities of life into best-selling stories for years to come because of her insight and love of people.

"I can remember the first day of law school, at an ice breaker, when we were supposed to tell three things about ourselves — two that were true and one that was not. The point was for us to figure out which was the lie. But Emily told these long, drawn-out, engaging stories that just captivated us all, just in the storytelling. I knew then she was going to have some kind of future as a writer. I'm not surprised," said Erinn Robinson of Atlanta.