Paula Fox is most famous for her novel Desperate Characters, which finely fillets the mores and anxieties of urban intelligentsia. We could stop right there, except that she is also the author of five more fine novels for adults (including Poor George, The Widow’s Children, and The Western Coast), twenty-odd novels for young people (including the Newbery winner The Slave Dancer), and two very engaging memoirs of her early years (Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter). Any of these would confirm her status as a writer of the very first order.

In her books, Fox has a nearly endless capacity for sympathy and understanding, but also for something harsher that looks at times like cruelty. It isn’t. The worlds she describes are not neat moral universes, and her characters, never purely this or that, are often put through painful paces. Children are kidnapped, orphaned, and cast out into the world with no assurance of safety; grown-ups are as likely to hurt as to help. Running through almost all her books is the harsh birthing of adult consciousness, and this is equally true of her work for adults as of her children’s books. Fox is terribly honest, and sometimes that means being honest about terrible things.

I visited Fox at her Brooklyn home a few days after the Virginia Tech shootings and a few days before her eighty-fourth birthday. On the way there, I stopped at a flower shop, and on the florist’s suggestion, I picked up some daylilies as a hostess present. This turned out to be a lucky good choice, as Fox had a vase full of nearly wilting daylilies in her kitchen. She put the fresh flowers in water, and we sat down to talk.

—Nick Poppy

I. SENTIMENT AND SENTIMENTALITY

THE BELIEVER: This is a thrill. I’ve read many of your books, and now I get to meet you. One thing I’d like to ask—I only came by your work at the turn of the millennium, when a lot of your novels were reissued. I wonder if you could talk about that?

PAULA FOX: I can tell you literally what happened. Jonathan Franzen wrote a piece for Harper’s. We already knew each other for a couple of years, but he had been teaching at Swarthmore, and he wrote me a note saying that he had found Desperate Characters and he would like ten copies if I had them. So I called my daughter who lives in Portland, and she went to Powell’s, the famous bookstore, to see if she could find Desperate Characters. She sent them...