Suleman’s response was very matter-of-fact. After her last successful round of I.V.F., Suleman said, she was left with 17 or 18 frozen eggs. For her last pregnancy — which resulted in twins — her doctor had “transferred in” five eggs. “So,” she said, “O.K., we’ll just re-enact that. And so he transferred in five or six. And we got negative results. Then he tried six. Negative results. And then he transferred in six more. And then this happened! That’s why this was beyond my wildest imagination — who would have ever imagined that that would happen?”

Campbell pressed her, asking, “Where did the desire to have another child come from?”

She interrupted him. “You don’t understand,” she said. “If you have these frozen embryos that are there, and they were writing you letters saying, We are charging you this much, and it’s going up and up and up every month that they are stored — you can either use them or destroy them. You’re like, O.K., I have six already. What’s another? And maybe it won’t even work. So, I just decided to take the chance because I didn’t want to destroy the embryos. That was the main focus — not like: ‘Oh, gosh! I really want eight!’ People were thinking, ‘Oh, she wanted so, so many.’ No!”

The conversation turned to plastic surgery. Suleman looked at a photo of Angelina Jolie and herself and said she saw no resemblance whatsoever. In fact, she said, “I wanted to go on a talk show and talk about this,” trotting out an explanation she used many times before — that she merely looked as if she had had plastic surgery because of the weight gain during her pregnancy.

What is it like to be linked so often to famous people — Michael Jackson (speculation flew about whether she’d been asked to the funeral), Jon and Kate and her supposed involvement in their split (at the time there were rumors she was dating Jon; now it has been reported she may star in a two-hour reality show in which they meet for the first time, “Jon - Kate = Jon + Octomom,” for what is said to be at least $1 million apiece)? “You have to laugh,” she said. When you’re the Octomom, rumors are spun about you out of sheer spite. That was one thing she learned from her experience. You had to learn how to let go. You had to keep your sense of humor about life. “One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard,” she said, “was a Denny’s joke. It said there was a new thing on the menu, that you could get eight eggs, no sausage and the person in the next seat gets to pay the bill. I thought that was absolutely hilarious!”

She laughed — what one of the crew members called her manic-depressive laugh. It was a strangely loud snort. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” like a comic-book laugh.

Among all the odd moments I witnessed during my visits with Suleman, there were genuine ones too, as when I watched her at what the family jokingly calls “the octotable,” a semicircle with eight little holes for eight babies to sit in, looking like the multiarmed Hindu goddess Kali, appearing to feed three babies at once while wiping the mouths of two others. I had seen her silence the near-constant din of eight babies crying. It happened one day after mealtime. She began to sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and suddenly, silence. One by one, the babies left off crying and looked up at her, transfixed, with total adoration. Mama!

The disconnect between her genuine-seeming commitment to motherhood and her haphazard approach to so many aspects of it was, for Campbell, the greatest paradox about Suleman. Was she exploiting her kids? No! Life had happened to her, she insisted. She studied for a master’s in child psychology. She wanted to be a psychiatrist. She hated the news media and the lack of privacy, the intrusion on her children’s innocence, the mockery. But really. “People are like, ‘Oh, why don’t you go to work?’ ” Suleman said into the camera that day. “O.K., think about the reality of that situation: I leave, I go to work, I’m away from them all day, I make — how much? $15,000 a year? O.K., I need that at least every two months. So, how on earth is that going to work? That’s absurd. You live in my life one day and you’ll see, you’ll realize: it’s ludicrous.”