Like most authors, Susan Minot is no stranger to writing about love, sex, and relationships. But for her latest novel, she wanted to take an erotic love story into somewhat uncharted territory.

“Usually, an erotic story is told separate from the story of motherhood, but we are still the same people, with the same urges to nurture, urges to disappear, that don’t necessarily go away when you’re a mother,” Minot says via Zoom from her island home in Maine. At 67, she is slim with blond hair, simple but elegant in her appearance. “That mothering urge doesn’t disappear when you’re in an obsession, so I wanted to put those together, since I don’t see that happening much in literature.”

Minot’s ninth book, Don’t Be a Stranger (Knopf, Oct.), centers on the relationship between a younger man and an older single mother. “Older is such a bad word,” Minot says. “I wanted to write about... not a love affair but a love that isn’t about practicalities, that’s about sensation, that’s not always logical. And to choose elements that aren’t usually in a love story.”

The novel is Minot’s first in 10 years—and it didn’t go exactly as planned. If there’s an operating principle to Minot’s writing, it might be summed up as “the less said the better.” She tried to stick with that mindset while writing Stranger, planning a slim little novel, but she soon realized the book was going to be different, bigger, and take a lot longer than she anticipated. And that slim little novel she envisioned gradually morphed into a 320-page book and a 10-year project.

Born in Boston, Minot grew up in a large family and wrote obsessively. “I went to boarding school, an excellent petri dish for a writer,” she says of her time at Concord Academy in Massachusetts. “Back then, in the early ’70s, we wrote notes; we communicated with songs, poems. I didn’t know what was going on around me, within me. Some things were wonderful, some puzzling, and writing was a compulsion that offered some relief.”

In 1975, Minot attended Brown University—there was no creative writing major, so she studied semiotics—and in 1981 she entered the MFA program at Columbia University, where she studied with Elizabeth Hardwick. Her 1986 debut novel, Monkeys, about a large Catholic family in New England, was published in a dozen countries and won France’s Prix Femina étranger. She followed this up with Lust & Other Stories (1989) and the novel Folly (1992). Her 1998 novel Evening was a bestseller and was nominated for an L.A. Book Award.

Additionally, Minot wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 film Stealing Beauty and collaborated with Michael Cunningham on the 2007 adaptation of Evening. She also paints, and credits her MFA experience at Columbia for her artistic versatility. “I would go upstairs and take a film class, then go downstairs to the arts studio and take a painting class,” she says. “The writing was in the middle. It was the most important, but I wanted something else. There was too much weight on the writing otherwise.”

And while Minot still paints—and is currently putting together her biannual art show in Maine—there’s no denying that she’s a writer first and foremost. In Don’t Be a Stranger, recently divorced 50-something Ivy Cooper is a financially struggling writer concerned about the well-being of her young son after their move from Virginia to New York City. While living in Greenwich Village, Ivy meets Ansel Fleming, a musician in his 30s who has just been released from prison after seven years on a drug conviction. Ivy wasn’t looking for an obsessive love but ends up falling hard. The novel tells a heartbreaking, life-affirming story, and readers will easily relate to the intensity of Ivy’s feelings as she finds herself in an impossible situation with an impossible man.

“Ivy is awed by the passion she feels for Ansel, instead of being completely undone,” Minot says. “She feels a kind of confidence she wouldn’t have had when she was younger. And she is kind of on her own; it’s not how the man is treating her that is causing her to have these feelings, which I think is very true of passion and eroticism. It’s almost as if Ansel, as essential as he is to her, is kind of a passerby.”

This is a theme, Minot says, that recurs when she writes about love affairs: “The focus is usually on what you share, the bonding and the binding. Yet I’m amazed how you can experience intimacy on your own.”

It’s this sort of insight that, according to Minot’s agent, Anna Stein, makes the author’s work so compelling. Don’t Be a Stranger “had me absolutely transfixed from the very first time I read pages,” Stein says. “Susan is so skilled at getting down to the essential feeling of a moment in time—whether emotional or purely physical—so brilliantly that it can be difficult to remember that we are only spectators, only readers.”

Knopf editor Jordan Pavlin describes Minot’s writing as electrifying in its precision. “She has a cool clinical eye that reminds me of Didion—but simmering beneath the intelligence and restraint is a smoldering sensual intensity that’s visceral and immediate and just completely transfixing,” Pavlin says. “There’s also a quality here that I think is wonderfully akin to Miranda July’s delectable All Fours—the sense of a brilliant female narrator who has gone somewhat feral at midlife.”

And while Don’t Be a Stranger isn’t autobiographical, Minot says she did draw from her experiences as a mother. “I am not the same as Ivy now, but I’ve been her age,” she says. “I’m not writing about someone that’s 85. So as far as the experience of a woman, a mother, I’m taking aspects of what I know and trying to spin a tale and examine aspects that I don’t always feel are focused on—that as a mother, logistical things take over. I definitely felt this when I was raising my daughter. Certain preoccupations I had were gone, eclipsed.”

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That mothering urge doesn’t disappear when you’re in an obsession, so I wanted to put those together, since I don’t see that happening much in literature.
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When she was writing Stranger, Minot says she paid careful attention to the end of the affair—to when Ivy is finally able to step back from Ansel. “Very often,” she says, “it goes like: she threw the keys in the river; then, if the story goes on, she takes up swimming. Or she meets the guy again. There’s another knock on the door. But it’s never as seamless as that, curing yourself of an addiction, an obsession, of a kind of mindset. It takes a lot of different things.”

And after the end of the affair? In fiction as in life, Minot hopes there’s joy inside all the pain. “It’s terrible, awful, but as Eve Babitz says, ‘This is about a terrible love affair, and I wouldn’t have missed a moment.’ ”