It’s not exactly clear how Nicole Krauss finds the time to write such rich and deeply intelligent fiction. In the five years since publishing her second acclaimed novel, History of Love, she’s had two children, earned a spot on The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list, and written a third novel, Great House, which has just been nominated for the National Book Award. Great House follows four separate stories connected by a single, hulking desk that's left behind, inherited, given, and received over generations. Four different characters narrate these elegiac stories, each with breath-holding intensity. Despite her early success as a novelist, Krauss assures me that she’s only just begun to realize what's possible in her craft. I spoke with her by phone about her literary loves, what keeps her up at night, and which genre she’ll never touch.

You've been quoted a number of times as saying that perfection is possible within a poem and that a novel is necessarily imperfect. From some writers I hear the inverse, that certain "perfect" novels make them feel like they should give up writing altogether. I'm wondering if there are any novels that make you reconsider the possibility of perfect fiction. I really feel strongly that it just simply isn't a possibility. In order for something to be perfect you have to have a very clear sense of what the form is, and when I say that a novel can't be perfect, what I'm trying to say is that novel, unlike many other art forms, doesn't have a clear, easily definable form. I find that thrilling because it means that each time you sit down to try to write one, one of the things you're asked to do is to redefine for yourself for that book. So when you have something that is so loose, that involves so much flexibility and possibility, it is very hard to measure its success. It's very easy to find failures in a novel, but it's harder to measure its success, except, I suppose, on its own terms.

I was really taken with the frame of the first chapter of Great House, which is Nadia giving a long confession to an unseen judge, and I'm interested by what drew you to that frame. Well, it's kind of a funny story, that particular voice, because she began, unlike all the other voices in the book, as a short story. It was one of the first things I had finished, and I was sure it was finished, and so I published it. It was called From the Desk of Daniel Varsky. Not long after I published it, it was included in an anthology, and that anthology asked me to describe in a short paragraph the origin of the story. So it dawned on me that the desk in the story was very much like my own desk. It's one of those striking things that happens to me all the time in my writing, this kind of willful blindness is pulled back and one sees with clarity that you thought you were inventing something, but in fact you were writing something from your own life.

So the interesting story about this desk is the fact that I inherited it. The prior owner of the house actually built it into this room, which was his office. I've always hated this desk; it's just so masculine and overbearing and kind of ugly. I wanted to get rid of it, but to get it out of the house and down the stairs you'd have to dismantle it, chop it up. So I realized, looking at this desk, which I had written about in the story, which wasn't yet a novel—not only did I realize this kind of mirror effect between fiction and life, but I also realized what that story was really about, this idea of the burden of inheritance. This was something I was thinking about a lot, because when I wrote this story I had just become a mother for the first time.

I'm kind of curious about that desk now. Did writing at that big hulking desk affect you in a way similar to the way it affected Nadia? Well, I'm not like her, so it wouldn't have the chance to affect me in that way. I have a much fuller life. She was interesting to me as a character because she made certain decisions that I didn't make in my life. There was a time that I might have, but I didn't, and I decided to have a family instead. She's a different personality, ultimately, although we share many thoughts in common.

You just had a child when you started Great House, but both the main women in the story have made the choice of not having families. It's really striking to me that you wrote about inheritance and what it's like to have children by writing about someone who has made the choice not to. It's often interesting to write about something by writing about the absence of it. It did become important to me at some point to have a voice in the book that was a parent who was willing to confront all that that had meant to him in his life. That's probably why Aaron, the only father, was kind of born.

And he's the angriest narrator in there. He was really the most difficult one to deal with while reading. He begins angrily, but I was drawn to him from the start. I had the sense that there was something very pained in him and somehow, even from the beginning, I had a kind of empathy for him. And I wanted to understand why, because I also saw him as overbearing and maybe even tyrannical. Certainly he describes himself that way, but it was interesting to go through his own descriptions of himself and begin to go further and understand that here was a father who had been turned away by his sons. His son had chosen the mother, and the father had felt very shut out. Once I began to see him that way, he changed for me. By the time you hear him in the second part of the book, there's a real fragility that creeps in. It's really a man at the end of his life, facing his death, and facing his own or his sons' moral judgment about what kind of father he was.

So you've already talked about the kind of cultural and emotional inheritance that Great House deals with. There's also a lot of lateral inheritance, from writer to writer. I'm wondering what friends or writers you feel like you inherit something from creatively. I think I have inherited so much from other writers. I feel very strongly about reading while I write. I know there are a lot of writers who don't, who feel that it will creep into their work and disrupt their own voice, but I feel just the opposite. I feel like it only reminds me of what is possible in literature, which is a really thrilling thing to be reminded of. A lot of the writers I love, I read them again to remind myself of how many ways you can break the rules, how you can stretch the form, and how many risks one can take.

What authors did you read while you were writing Great House? Well, there are different categories. There are the books that I'm reading for the first time, and then there are the books that I'm constantly re-reading, like Beckett. He is, I suppose, my favorite writer if I had to choose, which I don't want to. He's someone that I always return to, as is W.G. Sebald. I discovered Roberto Bolaño in 2003, when his first book was published in English. That was By Night in Chile, which was the book that just totally blew my mind. He is one of those writers who reminds you how infinitely flexible the form of the novel is.

Do you think Bolaño crept into Daniel Varsky? It's a question that people have asked, and I have to imagine that it's the case, because there are a lot of young Chilean poets in his work. At the time that I started writing this book, I became obsessed with the period following Pinochet's coup and all the kidnappings and disappearances that followed, to the point where I had read every book and seen every movie. I actually couldn't sleep at night and this was when I was pregnant with my first child.

Oh, Jesus. I know. It's sort of pathetic. I couldn't stop thinking about it and talking about it and it was really, in many ways, destructive. But in retrospect, I think it was a way to prepare myself or confront the fact that I was going to have this child in my life—that, if something happened to this child I wasn't sure I would be able to survive it. There was something in me that, in a very oblique way, needed to confront that.

Everyone seems to characterize you as this writer who is concerned with memory and history. The Guardian said that you were "preoccupied with the past," which I thought was a strange word to use. Do you think that's accurate or fair? I don't think I have read many novels that don't in some way explore the past and memory. Memory, after all, is what gives us a coherent sense of our selves, and I'm ultimately very interested in the inner life, rather than drawing a portrait of our time or writing a social novel. Once you're in the realm of the inner life, one's personal experiences loom large as a way to describe or explain whom that character has become.

I think it's sort of a silly thing to say that a book is about memory. It's so vague. What I would say about my characters is that I'm interested in their remembering minds, which seems to me to be a big distinction. I'm interested in how people create a sense of self out of fragments of experiences, and their perception of those experiences. And again, this is something that was in place in my first novel, a book about a man who loses most of his memory and who has to recreate his self out of these fragments. And this notion of, how does one create a coherent self out of memory, has always been interesting to me. Partially because, when you put it that way you realize there is a great deal of will and choice in the creation of self. Memory isn't something that happens to us; it is a creative act. And when you're reflecting, or when you are witnessing a remembering mind, you're also witnessing a great deal of invention and imagination and will, and that fascinates me.

Do you think that fascination would ever bring you to write or explore memoir? Never. Whenever I even think of writing something autobiographical my mind just freezes in panic. It's so far from my interests. I love the freedom that being a novelist affords me. To be a writer is to become anyone and to write anything, and all that hems you in is your own lack of courage to go to unknown and very difficult places. So, if I feel somehow that my writing is being dictated by what has actually happened to me, I lose that sense of freedom and it's no longer exciting to me. Having said that, after having written a story it hits me that I've drawn on my own life, but to draw on the personal—and when I say personal I mean one's emotional autobiography, rather than chronicling what's actually happened experientially—I think that's necessary in order to write something authentic. But it's different from writing memoir.