“I really, really like that,” she said. “When I go home after being in Midtown or even the Village, the vibe is so much more people going about their business — I need to buy shoelaces, or I need to buy a new wastebasket and some hangers, and then I’m going to go home. It’s not like, Hey, there’s this new hip restaurant on West 83rd street. I don’t think so. I really doubt that.”

Ms. Chast grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of parents who rarely left the neighborhood. Her father, a teacher, never learned to drive. “My mother drove, but she was a very anxious driver,” Ms. Chast said. “So I grew up with a lot of anxiety about cars and driving.

“We’d come into Manhattan to see plays, and we’d turn around and come back. We never stayed. There was always a story where something terrible happened to someone — some restaurant where a lady found a piece of glass in an olive. So you just ate at this one Chinese restaurant near our apartment and sat in the same booth, and you ordered the same food, moo goo gai pan, of course, because that’s safe.”

When she returned to New York after art school, in January 1978, it was to an apartment on West 73rd Street with no stove, just a hot plate, and wiring that regularly blew a fuse. Her parents helped with the rent. Four months later she sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker for $250, or roughly a month’s rent.

“She really opened the doors to a certain kind of idiosyncratic weirdness at The New Yorker,” said Emily Flake, 40, who followed Ms. Chast into the magazine’s pages three decades later. “Part of that has to do with coming from a point of view owned by a woman. She wasn’t the first female cartoonist at The New Yorker, but she’s one of the first female stars. She carved out a space for a more personal brand of weirdness for people who are similarly off the map.”

Richard Gehr, author of “I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists,” called Ms. Chast the magazine’s “first subversive cartoonist,” who was not appreciated by the older male cartoonists on staff. “She was a feisty, punky young person whose stuff looked completely different,” Mr. Gehr said. “A lot of other cartoonists there found that very challenging: if this is the new wave, what are we? And she’s come to display more range there than almost any other cartoonist in The New Yorker’s history.”

As Ms. Chast has aged, her characters, often loosely autobiographical, have aged with her, growing into middle age with their neuroses intact. “Some worries I’m probably going to carry with me until the point comes when you stop worrying, which is when you’re dead,” she said. “Where do I start? Driving, medical, electricity, basement, boilers.”