There's so much more to being a mother than being a mother. Take Elizabeth Hill, Martha Starr and Ann Upton, three Cleveland Park moms and grandmoms, who have 12 children and 19 grandchildren among them, but have also individually or jointly been publishers, educators, backpackers, artists, photographers, politicos, horticulturists, humorists, feminists, pianists, tap dancers, voracious readers, cooks and hostesses, bickering and bantering as they talk about all of it. And now, they're authors.

Hill, 74, and Starr, 68, share the big pink house on Newark Street NW where Hill raised her three daughters, one of whom now happens to be married to Starr's son. When the two mothers told their kids about their plan to cohabitate, Starr says her son Peter replied, "It's a great idea in theory, but I'm not quite sure I like the idea of calling my mother and having my mother-in-law answer the phone."

"When Liz and I met, she said, `Nice to meet you, what do you know about backpacking?' " Starr recalls. The conversation kept going, and before they knew it, they had taken a walking trip in England, where they took 10 rolls of film of the haunts of Virginia Woolf, an author they both admired. Next thing they knew, they had turned their adventure into a desk calendar published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, with quotations from Woolf's works and photos of where she had visited and lived. And the next thing they knew, they had started a small publishing company, called Starrhill Press, which published, among other titles, "Literary Cafes of Paris," by Noel Riley Fitch; "Book Marks for Cooks," a collection of bookmarks to earmark favorite cookbook recipes; and "Candles and Parsley," a little paperback with spaces for notes about dinner parties.