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Like The Boss, the contributing writers to Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take On the Garden State (Touchstone, 2007, 256 pages, $14) have a strong emotional connection to their home state. Their topics are a catalogue of everything New Jersey, from cranberry bogs to gangsters, from malls to the Nets. Each of the 18 autobiographical essays, most appearing here in print for the first time, is tagged with a Turnpike or Parkway exit number (remember Springsteen's "There's an opera out on the Turnpike"?) suggesting the specific setting.

Almost half the selections are by Jewish writers and many of them wrote about growing up Jewish in New Jersey. Their recollections are suffused with dark humor, their memories more haunted than nostalgic.

In a phone interview, the book's editor, Irina Reyn, who emigrated from Russia when she was 15, talked about reading the submissions for the first time. What surprised her the most was the writers' depiction of New Jersey as an unsafe place. "You expect bucolic and instead you see the undercurrent of malice. I always imagined New Jersey as an ideal place to grow up. It's a little more complicated than that," she said.

AMONG THE MANY writers who look back at the turmoil of adolescence, Frederick Reiken, the author of two successful novels (The Odd Sea and Lost Legends of New Jersey), calls his piece "Horizon House" (Exit 18W) after the Fort Lee high-rise where his father lived at one time and where he spent time during his parents' lengthy separation and divorce. He describes the journey from Livingston to Fort Lee on Route 80 "through the Meadowlands where we could smell the methane and other putrid chemicals wafting over the marshes." Livingston "was who I was and Horizon House was a rough and dirty secret I did not talk about with anyone."

In a phone interview with NJ Jewish News, Reiken recalled the '70s: "When you're 12 or 13, no matter what's going on, you have to survive it.… There were so many elements of menace. Nothing personal about the menacing atmosphere. Even getting beaten up by a mobster's son was not personal. I just happened to be there — summer of New York blackout, Son of Sam — almost like a cosmic thing."

A year later, he was enrolled in the Pingry School in Martinsville. "I had two friends — the two other Jewish kids in my class. I went from being part of the gang in grade school to feeling like a very peripheral kid with a couple of friends. I learned how to act really non-Jewish…. I went to Pingry and then I went to Princeton, and that was equally a non-Jewish atmosphere." Anti-Semitism, he said, "is really a function of New Jersey, especially northern New Jersey."

After college, Reiken worked as a wildlife biologist in Israel. "It was 10 years after Fort Lee and…I was working in an environment where people were like me. It wasn't as if I had a religious awakening and threw myself down at the Wall," he said, adding that in Israel, he felt Jewish and said to himself, "‘Hey, I'm Jewish. I feel comfortable here and I've been trying to be something else.'"

Now a writer and literature professor at Emerson College in Massachusetts, Reiken is working on another novel. Is it set in New Jersey? He wouldn't say.

FOR HIS ESSAY, novelist Joshua Braff (brother of Scrubs' Zach) skips a title and settles for the tag. He calls his lighthearted account of a long courtship "Exit 15W" after his hometown, South Orange, but he might have titled it "Jersey Girl" after the Springsteen song. Both the song and the memoir evoke romantic Saturday nights, the Jersey shore, and youthful angst — Braff, in fact, married his Jersey girl. "I've never had any trouble being proud of the fact that I'm from New Jersey," he writes.

Braff reminisces about the landmarks of his youth: Gruning's, a local ice cream shop; Columbia High School; a bat mitzva at the West Orange Manor; a house party on Long Beach Island. In a phone interview, however, he talked about things he remembers less fondly. Some of those events and emotions, shaped and reimagined, are central to his 2005 novel The Unthinkable Thoughts of Jacob Green, about a smart and witty 13-year-old growing up in Jersey in the '70s, full of angst and fearful of disappointing his demanding and charismatic father.

Like the novel's protagonist, Braff attended a yeshiva — the Hillel Academy in Perth Amboy — and his family belonged to Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange. "Judaism was given to me," he said. "I didn't choose it. The way I was brought up it felt like it was a task — getting dressed for the holidays didn't feel like fun; going to Hebrew school wasn't fun." Several trips to Israel as a child and an adult, however, convinced him that he could "go at this at my own speed without having someone looking over my shoulder. And the good thing is that I have come back to it through my wife."

"Now," he said, "when I come back and I see what New Jersey is, to me it has a diversity that California doesn't have."

"THEY COME in the night, setting fire to our front lawn, cars careening across our summer grass.... In autumn, they toss raw eggs at the white columns of our house. Dani Shapiro In winter, they leave TV dinners filled with dog shit steaming in the snow outside our front door. In summer the cars come screeching down the street, gaining momentum until they fly across our front lawn, ruining the sprinkler system my parents so proudly installed when they bought their piece of the American suburban dream."

So Dani Shapiro begins her memoir, "New Jersey, 1963 (Exit 143B)," describing Hillside, where she grew up. "It was just one of those towns, a piece of bad luck, the wrong place to live," she writes. "We were surrounded by people who were more like one another than we were like them."

In a phone interview, Shapiro spoke about the violent and primitive anti-Semitism that marked her childhood: "I certainly don't think that New Jersey itself was a hotbed of anti-Semitism," she said, adding, "I have happy memories but the strangeness of growing up Orthodox in a neighborhood that had these pockets of anti-Semitism" is an indelible part of her past.

She attended the Solomon Schechter Day School in Union until sixth grade and then the Pingry School. Her "family's observance made me feel very different and no child likes to feel different," she said, and she rebelled: Divorced at 20, "too embarrassed to return to dorm life," she tried "putting distance between me and home."

Today a successful writer with six books to her credit, Shapiro teaches writing at Wesleyan University in Connecticut; her essays, including one on Bruce Springsteen, have appeared in magazines like The New Yorker and are frequently anthologized. "Today I live a very different life," she said. "For one, I'm not Orthodox. I live with my husband and young son in an area…that is not very Jewish at all, which has, in fact, pushed me into the direction of creating some sort of Jewish identity for myself and my family. I want my son to know where he comes from."

At the end of her memoir, Shapiro describes returning to the Hillside house one evening, 23 years old, "a baby-divorcee who smokes too much and has no idea what to do with her life." Peering at the darkened house from her car window, she thinks about "the darkness it holds for me."

In her interview, Shapiro quoted author Flannery O'Connor: "Any writer who lives to 15 has enough material to write about for a lifetime." That seems to go double for New Jersey natives.

NEXT TO MY parents, there is a glass case filled with ancient Judaica: blown glass from Jerusalem, antique silver wine goblets, parchment so old it crumbles to the touch. An intercom lets them hear me rustling in my bed. They look at each other, worry etched on their faces. They blame themselves, they blame one another, they blame history and the accident of geography that brought them to this neighborhood. Outside, there is a lone shout in the night — "Dirty Jews!" — and my father holds his head in his hands, fragile as an artifact.

I grew up in a house protected by three different kinds of alarm systems: A steady red light outside the front and back doors switched on by a small circular key. A motion detector in specific, supposedly crime-prone rooms, activated by currents in the air. And carefully placed "panic buttons" — one in my parents' bedroom and another in the kitchen. When pushed in unison, they set off an ear-splitting siren in the house and an alert to the local police of a crime in progress.... The key word was "protection." I don't know if this quest to seal us off from the rest of the world began before or after the violence and the screamed epithets in the night. But I have my hunches; my parents were both fearful people who believed that it was possible to control life, to keep the bogeyman away, to buy safety.

It was, I suppose, a piece of bad luck that my parents bought a house in a neighborhood where Jews weren't welcome. They were hardly kids when they married — well into their thirties and each divorced. Their decision to choose this particular house, this particular neighborhood, was a well-considered one. No doubt, they wasted hours debating the merits of the city versus the suburbs, New Jersey versus Connecticut. They wanted a home they could settle into, within commuting distance of the city and walking distance of a synagogue.... They have driven from the city in my father's baby blue Chrysler, more boat than car, and they have brought my father's parents with them to see the house.... In their mind's eye, the rooms are already being filled — they can see the teal velvet couch, the Eames chairs, the Ben Shahn lithograph in my room. My grandfather gives a nod of approval. "Now, this is balebatish," he says, this man whose own father was an immigrant and who now lives in a grand apartment on Central Park West. This is proper and beautiful.