I met Renata Adler on a cold December day–actually, on 12/12/12, a date that spawned mass weddings and superstitions–at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York. We realized within minutes of being seated that the plan was a mistake. Over endlessly echoing, impossibly loud lunchtime noise, we ordered Bloody Marys and the briniest mollusks and agreed to just treat lunch as lunch. We would conduct the real interview after, elsewhere. After lunch, we packed up our belongings— which included a rolling suitcase— shimmied into our down coats, and made our way to a midtown café. As she leaned in to answer my questions (and ask plenty of her own), the tail of Adler’s famous, waist-length braid sat coiled on the table like a sleeping snake.

Earlier that week, her first article in over ten years, a negative review of a biography, had appeared to the delighted surprise of many–in Town & Country of all places. Her two previously out-of-print novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark—both first-person, elliptical and cultishly adored—were on the verge of being reissued by the New York Review of Books. Once a much-talked about media darling (her illustrated portrait graced a cover of New York in 1983), Adler spent the last decade self-secluded in semi-rural Connecticut. She has fervent fans and bitter enemies, probably in equal number, and in certain bookish circles, she looms like an enigmatic specter: terrifying, absent, revered and argued about; not quite of this world.

Born in 1938, Adler began her career in the early 1960s as a New Yorker staff writer, reporting on everything from the civil rights movement to the Sunset Strip, in a journalistic voice that is authoritative and unsparing. She took a sabbatical from the magazine to review films for the New York Times, then again to attend law school at Yale. The targets of her polemics have included Pauline Kael, Robert Bork, group therapy, and The New Yorker itself. Her fiction makes you wonder if you’ve ever truly paid close attention to anything; it’s as if she recorded a year’s worth of ambient conversation, transcribed it, and edited the text so only poetry, wisdom, and human hypocrisy remain.

—Alice Gregory

I. HE DRANK SCOTCH; HE SMOKED

THE BELIEVER: Do you think there’s a difference between people who start off writing fiction and then write nonfiction, versus people who start off writing nonfiction and then write fiction? Do you think the order matters?

RENATA ADLER: There are so many different types of writers. It’s just sheer coincidence that they’re all called writers. I once sat at lunch...