In We Do What We Do in the Dark (Riverhead, May), Hart delves into an affair between a college student and her female professor.

Do you think a story about two women offers a different set of power dynamics compared to one involving a man?

I think it does, both personally and culturally. Even though they’re different in station and position in life, the title of the book, which comes from a line the woman says to Mallory, addresses how they’ve gone about life and relationships in a similar fashion. I think that’s a very uniquely female way of going about the world. They are so often told to conceal their lust, which, compounded with the loneliness, makes it different.

Why isn’t the professor character named?

I had first written this as a short story with the characters identified as “the girl” and “the woman.” It was fun to write, almost like a fairy tale. When it came time to expand into a novel, it was hard to have the main character be “the girl” and I landed on Mallory. I thought, I should name the woman, but everything I came up with made the character more mundane. Then I started thinking that to Mallory she would always be “the woman,” the ideal to which you aspire, the pinnacle.

Do you think Mallory would view her relationship differently after #MeToo?

I wrote two-thirds of this before 2018, and #MeToo altered how I was writing it. I wasn’t necessarily making it a #MeToo story, but I was getting a better sense of the stakes. What’s fascinating to me about #MeToo is that it recontextualizes experiences. The book was always about Mallory continually recontextualizing this relationship. Mallory would never refer to her own story using outside cultural context, but #MeToo would cause her to see it as part of this endemic thing that’s happening.

You previously worked as a books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine. How did that shape your own writing?

In my nearly four year at O, I became a more incisive editor. Most of the stuff I was writing was 300 words or less, and there every word matters. The writing in the book is minimalist and that comes from me thinking, “Do I really need to add that?” Another way it impacted me was I was reading four or five books a day, just sort of looking at the first couple of chapters and learning very quickly what excites you and what annoys you. I wrote the book how I would want to read it.