"This isn't a report from my life," Isabel Fonseca says of her debut novel, Attachment, as we sit in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel one recent morning. She knows that because her novel—which comes out next month—is about an American woman living at the other end of the world with her British husband, people will assume the characters are a thinly-veiled version of her and her husband, the acclaimed novelist and essayist Martin Amis, but, she assures me, "if I was really writing about me, I'd write about my own life." Instead, she chose to use fiction as a vehicle to explore her internal responses to universal issues around intimacy and unknowing, whether it's between friends, a husband and wife, or a parent and child, and around her own midlife situation. "Everybody has death-awareness," she observes. "Everybody gets older. Everybody has parents die." The closest she came to inserting autobiographical details into the narrative, she says, is in her descriptions of Manhattan during the 2003 blackout, "a day that allowed for extraordinary and unsolicited intimacy."

Anyway, she asks, "Readers don't care who you are, do they? They just read the book. It's journalists who care about that stuff." What readers are looking for from fiction, she believes, is a different kind of candor than that exhibited by memoirists. "It's not reference," she explains. "It's an accuracy of perception. That's what interests you in the writers you love, not whether what they write is true. When you throw a book across the room, it's because it's full of metaphors that aren't true."

That's why she was so surprised when some of the first editors to read Attachment in manuscript form rejected the novel because, they told her, they couldn't fall in love with the main character, a middle-aged woman who juggles the suspiction that her husband is having an affair with a breast cancer scare and her father's medical emergency, and that they found it difficult even to simply identify with her responses to these events. "Who knew that was the service I was supposed to provide?" she asks rhetorically.

(And if they find it hard to identify with Fonseca's protagonist, I joked, what on earth would they do when forced to confront Amis's fiction? "But he's not really very cool or streetwise in real life," she comments. "He's much more likely to want to talk about poetry.")

Fonseca began working on the novel at the home she and Amis shared in Uruguay when she became stalled on a nonfiction project about her family. The working conditions were highly conducive for productivity; their children didn't come home from school until 5 p.m. and, for the first year, the house had no Internet access. "The day is so long when you don't have all that bombardment," she reflects, and the first version of Attachment came quickly. "Then it took me much longer to unwrite it," she admits—shortly after she'd finally landed the book deal, she realized the novel was about 100 pages too long, and needed to be cut by about 25 percent.

What's it like having another writer in the house? "We spend all day together in the same building, but we don't chat around the coffee pot," she observes. "Martin's a good reader—we have really passionate discussions about were versus was, and that versus which. But we don't show each other pages at the end of the day; it'd be like jogging together."

And though it's been over a decade since the publication of Bury Me Standing, Fonseca's front-line consideration of Gypsy culture, she says she feels that Attachment isn't so radically different a book, sensing a similarity in voice between them. Will it take another ten or more years for her next book, I wonder, and will it be a novel or nonfiction? "It's not so much about having the time as about different concerns," she answers. "You have certain questions that nag at you until you deal with them on the page. You're still trying to do justice to the truth of something. For this particular subject, this seemed like the way to do it. I'm sure I'll do nonfiction at book length again. It's just a question of subject."