BOOK REVIEW / SHORT STORIES : Memories of Pleasure and Pain : THE TIGER IN THE GRASS: Stories and Other Inventions by Harriet Doerr; Viking; $19.95, 210 pages

Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that you’ve all read Harriet Doerr’s first book, “Stones for Ibarra” (Viking / Penguin, 1984) and most likely, her second book, “Consider This, Senora” (Harcourt Brace, 1993). (Having read the first and waited nine long years, you would certainly have devoured the second, unless you were out of the country or off the planet.)

And let’s say, if you’re the nosy sort of reader who can never really let the work stand on its own, despite the now old New Criticism, that you started wondering, “Who is this woman? Where does she live? What does she look like?” You most definitely would have been frustrated by her dignified shyness.

Someone somewhere might have told you that she went back to college to finish her education in her mid-60s, and published “Stones for Ibarra” when she was 74. You probably suspected that her tales of Mexico were, if only in texture and character but not in plot, partially autobiographical (so much love for rocks and faces and rituals is hard to fake in real life, much less in widely published fiction). But still, you wanted more.

Despite the fact that a few of the essays and stories in this new collection are autobiographical, Harriet Doerr has one of those sly memories that is sharpest and clearest when it is rolling in the high clover of life’s best times. For Doerr, these are summers spent on the beach with her husband and two young children, the years they lived in Mexico, and the time she went back to school, as a widow of 65, to get her bachelor of arts degree from Scripps College and then Stanford University.

What does she remember? The childhood sleeping porch she shared with two sisters, touching the rough grain of redwood shingles at the head of her cot, new moons, shooting stars, a hill “wooded with eucalyptus and pine,” a “canyon full of honeysuckle,” a house with “tiles around the fireplace,” air that “smells of wet clay.” “I know,” she writes, “that I am better nourished now by images and echoes than I ever was by bread and wine.” And while her memories of childhood are more fragmented, lodged in the five senses, it is the memories of Mexico that have given Doerr her stories; they are the connecting tissues, the source of metaphors, the threads of her memory.

“Were you happy?” a woman at a conference asked Doerr about the 42 years of her married life. “I never heard of anyone being happy for 42 years,” Doerr responded, adding, “And would a person who was happy for 42 years write a book?” In fact, many of these stories--”Sun, Pure Air, and a View,” “Way Stations,” “Carnations,” and “Saint’s Day” in particular--are full of pain.

Still, there is much to be said for selective memory, making, as it does, those last decades so much more pleasant; revealing a sturdy, good nature, a humble, grateful temperament. And it becomes clear, reading these stories and memories, that Doerr is a person who needs very little to be happy. “I have everything I need,” she writes. “A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen and memory raining down on me in sleeves.” Memories tinged with joy lose none of their poignancy, and translate better across decades and classes and races from writer to reader than anger, bitterness, jealousy and even fear.

In the first and title essay, “The Tiger in the Grass,” memories of Doerr’s life are fixed to the fact that her son is dying of lung and brain cancer. She wanders back in time, and is pulled to the present by her love for him, recorded in brief italic passages that interrupt the text and describe his condition. The last passages of the essay are testimony to the ineffable way that pain fragments memory, and to the way that we learn to live side by side with our demons:

“My son called to say he was dying. He had fallen down and couldn’t get up. I think of what it is like to write stories. . . . It is discovering something you didn’t know you’d lost. It is finding an answer to a question you never asked. I think of all our children. Let us celebrate the light-haired, the dark-haired, and the redheads, the tall ones and the short ones, the black-eyed, brown-eyed, and blue-eyed, the straight ones and the gay ones.”

You go and find your son, your nephew, your neighbor’s child and kiss them. You touch the doorknob, the shingles on the house, the covers on the book. They burn themselves into your memory. This is why you read Harriet Doerr.