your first two novels were in the first person and had the same wonderful central character. Was it tough to let go of her?

I guess so! There is something about having a first novel published — if it does the least bit well, then the question everybody asks, and you ask yourself, is: Can I do something totally different? I've written about a mother and daughter, now can I write a war novel? So I started writing another book, little parts of which ended up in "A Regular Guy" but most of which I threw out, because it was contrived. There are the kind of books you would like to write, and the kind of books you need to write — the same way there is the way you live and the way you'd like to live and dally with.

Then I started a book about a woman who was searching for her father; I hadn't connected it to the first book, but it eventually grew into the same character. I think I got that out of my system, and it was surprisingly easy to move on. You never leave things at just the right moment — it's either a little too early or too late, and I think by the time I was done with "The Lost Father" it was probably a little late. I was tired of that first-person voice, which is so limited and specific. There are so many dimensions you have to leave out, so it was fun and very liberating to start to write in third person.

Many of the male characters in your books are rather distant and callous, including the "regular guy" of the title, Tom Owens. Have you had any feedback from men over the years?

All of them? I hope not ... hmmm. I think the first book was so much about women that the feedback was mainly, "Will you ever write about men?" The second book was about the idea and absence of a man. With this book, there's Noah [a friend of Owens], who I don't think is distant. And Owens is a complex character ...

Do you remember the controversy surrounding the negative portrayal of black men in "The Color Purple"?

There was also a political dimension to that, I think — there was the sense that it reinforced stereotypes about black men. Who knows, maybe I'm reinforcing stereotypes about successful white men. But I think Owens does grow in the course of the book.

Owens' daughter, Jane, is raised by her mother in a commune and yearns for a conventional life. The singer Courtney Love grew up in a similar setting and she has talked about how she wasn't allowed girly toys or dresses as a kid. She feels she's making up for it now with a vengeance.

Really? That's funny, because in the book, Jane's not allowed to wear dresses either. There are an inordinate number of kids at Bard who grew up on communes — it's the kind of school you'd go to if you grew up in a commune, I suppose — so I became very interested in that. I know one girl from Bard who grew up in a van following the Grateful Dead. She never went to any school until she was 15, then did well on her SATs and got into Bard. She's not a straight kid, just a complicated, interesting person. We're just far enough from that generation to start to see all of that.

The parent-child relationship looms so large in your fiction. Do you think being a mother will change the way you write about it in the future?

My son's not even three yet, but it probably will. I think as a writer you inhabit all the roles anyway. The first scene I wrote for "Anywhere But Here" was the scene where the mother puts the kid out by the side of the road and drives away. A lot of people asked me if that had ever happened to me. And in fact it hadn't. But people would come up to me after readings and say, "I did that" or "That happened to me." I think I always identified partly with the parents, because they're more complicated, and you're always trying to write out of your complications, not your simplicities. But I'm sure it'll be very different now that I'm a mother. The whole first year, when I was breast-feeding and I was in a haze, I wouldn't have even tried writing about it, and I haven't written much about parents and children since then.

You once wrote, "Duty is the enemy of art." How does that square with motherhood?

It must have been wishful thinking, because I always have so much duty in my life! So much of writing, like any discipline, is about clearing your life out for the practice of writing. You get very severe, in a way: you decide this is the most important thing and all other things are relegated to the edges of your life. But a child cannot really be relegated. Mine can't, anyway. Otherwise, why have them? At the same time, the doctor who delivered my son is married and has two children, and she works like a maniac. If you meet this woman, it's hard to believe that she would not have good children, that they would not be all right. It's a question women of our generation are still feeling their way around. My mom worked, so I probably have a slightly sentimental view of the cookies-and-milk-after-school thing. Yet, whatever we do give our kids, we probably can't give them what was good about our childhood, and we probably won't — just by accident — give them what was bad. It's a whole different set of circumstances.

I don't know about duty to community — God knows Keats worked, Wallace Stevens worked every day of his life. I'm middle-class enough to think a good day's work is helpful for anybody.

In Granta's Best Young American Writers list, they categorized you as a West Coast writer. Does it make sense to divide writers by geographical regions in a country where every state has the same generic malls and fast food joints?

I guess they called me that because I've been living in California the last few years. I do feel like a California writer right this minute because the next book I'm writing is very much a Los Angeles book. It's something I've wanted to do because I spent a lot of my childhood there. Regions are always deceptive; so much of what we think of as regional — idiomatic expressions and dialect — is more specific than regions. It has do with where the people who live there emigrated from, with class and all kinds of other things.

I read that you went to Beverly Hills High School. Was it just like "Beverly Hills 90210"?

I'm afraid I've never watched it, but one of my high school friends was furious because at one point she had an idea of doing a show but never got around to it! At the time I was there, there was a lot of money, a lot of drugs, a lot of insanity. It was a public school and there was busing, but it wasn't at all integrated. So many people in Beverly Hills had domestic servants, so their kids went there too, and it was still a time when a middle-class kid like me could get in.

You studied writing in a Master of Fine Arts program, and then taught at NYU and Columbia. In recent years there's been some concern that M.F.A. courses are churning out homogenous writers who've had all the interesting idiosyncrasies trained out of them.

I don't think that's true — but I don't think everyone should get an M.F.A. either. It shouldn't become like a law degree where everyone needs one. Of my former NYU students, two have had books come out, four more will have books coming out this year, and they're all very different. Several of my students became good friends, but they had led such different lives and such different styles that I think working together kept their idiosyncrasies intact.

I always ask my Bard students what they're going to do after graduation, and if they have a good plan, I never encourage them to go to grad school; I tell them to write, live, travel, see where they are in 3 to 5 years. Most people in M.F.A.s tend to be quite a bit older, have seen some of the world, have a job — and the class gives them a community to share their work and discuss the complexities of moonlighting, which is really what they're doing.

Writing is so isolated, there isn't really a meeting place — a water cooler — for writers to ask each other questions about how they do things, which things work and don't work. Which is why I find a lot of writers online.

Exactly. In the past, you read about how Richard Hugo had this long correspondence with other poets, but that doesn't seem to happen as much anymore. Sometimes I read a critic and if I love their work I'm tempted to write them: Please tell me 17 things I should learn! But of course you couldn't do that ... I always tell people when they're picking a graduate school to forget the name of the school and look for the writer you want to study with.

Are the great writers always the best teachers?

I've found in my life that the great writers are the great teachers. They may not always be hand-holding teachers, but I've never had a writer whose work I respected be mean or ungenerous.

In the new book you have Owens, who spends his life buying people and things, and as a counterpoint there's his friend Noah, an idealistic scientist who can't be bought. Does selling out become more of an issue as you become more successful?

It's probably less of an issue for fiction writers! I just read an essay by Allan Gurganus about Scott Fitzgerald dying in Hollywood at 41 trying unsuccessfully to sell out, which I thought was a great line. You know, Noah at many points wonders whether he's foolish for his fidelity to his work, and I think we all feel that way sometimes. Especially living in Los Angeles, one is struck by this question when one is impoverished compared to [screen]writers who are making lots of money. And who are in fact writing what the culture watches. It's not a question I torment myself over, but it's certainly very much part of this book.

Los Angeles is such a strange place. Most middle-class houses in L.A. have private security services, so they basically have private guards. And the gated compounds ... and yet it's a fascinating city, because it's full of immigrants and that immigrant energy. The way writers for print are viewed there is probably akin to the way, in New York, restorers of medieval frescos are viewed or something. It's a sort of respect — respect for the charm and antiquity and futility of it! But I don't think film threatens fiction in any real way.

Your characters ring so true that one assumes they integrate autobiographical elements. Lately the literary community has been worrying over "the memoirization of American fiction" — writers relying too heavily on the facts of their own lives, and not enough on pure imagination. Is that a fair complaint?

You know, some people write factually and write brilliant books, and others make it all up and write equally brilliant books. The important thing is to know what of life will translate to the culture of the page and what will not, and to understand that significant distinction. I had a student a few years ago who wrote a very made-up, cartoony story about a girl who poisoned her fellow campers at camp when she was about seven; they all almost died and she got caught. I told the student, "This doesn't seem to be working, it doesn't feel coherent." And she said, "It happened, it's all true." The fact that it's true doesn't lift it to the level of art, nor does it disqualify it from being art. Primo Levi was a great writer and much of his best writing was nonfiction. And yet, another person could have been on the same migrations in those same camps and not written those books.

I make up a lot. I don't want to have to stick to any particular truth just because it happened. I suppose it depends on how religious you are — how much you see a pattern in life, and how much you see as random. I tend to see things as more random than probably a memoirist would. As Wallace Stevens said, fact is only the base for art or poetry.

I'm told you're very uncomfortable talking about your family ...

It's not that I'm uncomfortable talking about them but ... [trails off, jaw stiffens]

... All right, your half-brother, Steve Jobs [co-founder of Apple Computers]. Yet the central character in the book, Owens, is a college dropout turned Silicon Valley millionaire whose story seems to resemble Jobs's quite a bit. Surely you knew people would make that connection?

I'm always aware that people will look for parallels in real life, but I'm not writing autobiography. I knew when I wrote about a mother that some people would think it was my mother, and when I wrote "The Lost Father" I received this tragic letter from somebody who said, "I've read your book and I think I've found your father. Here's his picture." I think that person literally didn't realize it was fiction.

Why are people so interested in the writer's personal life? Is it that we're voyeurs, or because people are interested in how a seemingly normal person can create art?

Fiction confuses people because you know there's probably some little nuggets of the person's life jumbled up in their work but you don't know what they are. Artists represent boundary-crossers in our society, so everybody's looking to them, hoping they're having great, dangerous experiences. But a lot of fiction writers have relatively boring lives, because they're living in other worlds half the time. I don't think I've ever revealed anything about my family in this or any of my books. There are no secrets exposed.

What writers have influenced you?

I've always read out of the century — Chekhov, Tolstoy, Proust, Flaubert, George Eliot. And other people who probably have influenced my writing are Kafka and Garcia Marquez. I read all the time.

Is there ever the fear that you might absorb too much of another writer's style?

I don't think so. I read enough that I have so many contradictions they'd short each other out. And especially when you're reading another century, it's not a concern. The construct of so many 19th century novels is that a marriage is the end of the book — that basic idea of that being at the center of the novel wouldn't be possible now. You want to deepen and develop your voice, but you can't really steal someone else's depths!

Joy Press is a freelance writer and co-author with Simon Reynolds of "The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, & Rock 'n' Roll," just out in paperback from Harvard University Press.