As tensions increased over the summer, O'Donnell put off plans to spend more time in the office, working mostly by telephone and e-mail. In the four months since she left the TV show, she says she has devoted much of her time to such domestic pursuits as planning birthday parties and driving carpool for her three children -- Parker, 7, Chelsea, 5, and Blake, 2 1/2 -- and tending to her pregnant partner, Kelli Carpenter, 35, who is expecting the couple's daughter in December. "Chelsea said to me, 'Mommy? It's better when you have no job.' I said, 'You are right, honey, it is,' " she says. Even so, "I'm not Suzie Homemaker going, 'I quit my job and show business is horrible and screw the masses.' "

Celebrity soccer mom? Foulmouthed comedian? Boss from hell? Will the real Rosie please stand up? "I have not had a personality change," insists O'Donnell, barefoot and sipping Diet Coke in a hotel room in L.A., where she is spending a weekend. "I don't think that anything I've done recently is inconsistent with what I have done my whole life." To those who have difficulty reconciling her post-TV headlines with the cheery talk show Rosie (who earned an estimated $25 million a year), she points out that the show "was afternoon, families, Merv Griffin. That doesn't mean I had a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde side that I was hiding." And although she has publicly discussed her battle with depression -- notably in a Rosie cover story last year -- she says that, in fact, her condition has improved in recent months. "I'm happy to say that my medicine has been greatly reduced since leaving the show," O'Donnell says. "I will probably need medication for a while, if not forever. But I am not different on it. The thing that's different is that the gray veil that surrounded me was lifted, and life once again was Technicolor."

Carpenter, she says, has also helped. "She is a gift in my life," says O'Donnell, who threatened to sue The National Enquirer after the tabloid claimed they were breaking up. "We have not now, nor have we ever considered, nor will we, break up," she says. "I know public figures aren't supposed to say that because, well, what will happen if we do? But I am telling you, inside my heart, I know this to be true."