Still, if not precisely an outsider artist, Zink was, for a very long time, an outsider: unknown, unpublished, living deliberately far from the mainstream and looking at it with the sharply angled vision that such a position affords. But, with the enthusiastic reception of “The Wallcreeper” and the publication of “Mislaid” by a mainstream press, Zink has migrated to the inside. At a time when American literati are debating whether writers are better served by living in New York City or getting an M.F.A., such migrations, from so remote a starting point, are far from the norm. How Zink accomplished hers, halfway through her life and from half a world away, is a story nearly as improbable as anything in “Mislaid.”

“Nell Zink,” Nell Zink assures me, is her real name. Her birth certificate lists her as Helen—“I guess because there was no St. Nell to baptize me after”—but she is Nell for all other official and interpersonal purposes. Zink offers up this information unprompted, but it is the case that her name, her life story, even her existence can provoke in others a sense of suspicion, a feeling that perhaps they are the subject of a colossal put-on. “Everything in her life beginning with her own name sounds made up,” Franzen told me. “ ‘Nell Zink from Bad Belzig’!”

Zink is not exactly from Bad Belzig, though that’s where she lives now. She was born in Corona, California, in 1964, moved with her family to King George County, Virginia, when she was seven, and is talking to me in Berlin, in the studio apartment, belonging to a friend, where she stays when she visits the city. The mattress she sleeps on while there is in a corner on the floor. She is sitting in a chair opposite, cross-legged, in cords and a hoodie, betraying no evidence of the fact that she is fifty-one or of the zany headlong energy of her books. In person, Zink is self-contained, deliberate, and serious. At present, she is nursing a cup of coffee and talking about artillery.

“In King George County, there’s a stretch of the Potomac River that does this—curves around and then runs straight for miles,” she says. The hand without the coffee cup snakes through the air to illustrate. “The Navy would test the guns for its ships there, up to eighteen-inch guns, just fire these huge projectiles, which would then sometimes come bouncing into Colonial Beach.” Sounds dangerous, I observe. Yes, she says. The river was closed to civilians during the week. Occasionally, the projectiles would bounce farther, into town.

Zink’s father, who died in 2006, was a Navy engineer; it was his job that brought the family to King George County. At the time, only some eight thousand people lived there, many of them black and a disproportionate number of the rest, she recalls, members of the Ku Klux Klan. Zink’s family was not among these, but she remembers the rallies, and, as a kid, she says, “it never crossed my mind that there was anything unusual about them.”

Zink grew up “in the sticks,” in a house surrounded by woods, with her parents and two brothers, one thirteen months older and one twenty months younger. It was not a happy childhood. In “Sailing Toward the Sunset,” she writes, “My verbal skill, such as it is, originated not in a habit of speaking, but in a lifetime spent preparing a single essay . . . on the subject ‘Why are you crying?’ ” That passage is autobiographical. “I did cry every day at school, for I don’t know how many years,” Zink says. Her mother, a librarian and Marine Reservist who became a housewife after marriage, pulled Zink out of class every six weeks or so, “for what she called psyche repair,” and, choosing to believe that Zink simply needed to be in college, took her to Fredericksburg and let her wander around the University of Mary Washington.

Zink really was intellectually undernourished, in both the Virginia public schools and the Shenandoah Valley boarding school she attended on a merit scholarship for the end of high school. But a better education would not have resolved her unhappiness. She makes it clear that her childhood was traumatic, in ways that render the word “perpetrator” relevant and that also implicate those who failed to protect her. But she is circumspect about the details, and wary of retroactive narratives. “I think a lot of people flatter themselves that their memories are much more accurate than they are,” she says, “and they forget that the perspective of a kid is so limited and unsophisticated.” For herself, she says, “I know for a fact that there’s a moral judgment I brought to it as an adult that I was incapable of having as a child. Just like with Klan rallies: it’s normal.”

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Zink responded to her circumstances “by pitching my tent outside the folds of humanity.” She sought refuge in the wilderness surrounding her house, and in books. “We were encouraged to read,” she says, “because a child who is reading is a very quiet child and does not cause any trouble while it’s reading.” While still young, she fell in love with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and by the time she was eleven or twelve she had read “Hamlet,” in her estimation, “a million times.” Around that same age, she read “The Sacred Wood,” a collection of T. S. Eliot’s essays and literary criticism. When she wasn’t reading, she spent a lot of time sitting alone in a boat on a pond.

Zink began writing at a young age as well, but, unlike her reading, that behavior was not met with approbation. “My mother was very, very critical of my early efforts,” Zink says. “She was, like, ‘At your age, the Brontës were doing X, Y, and Z.’ ” She gives me an “I know” look; as an adult, Zink understands how that criticism sounds. As a child, however, she had already taken her own measure and found it wanting. “I was definitely a poser as a little kid,” she says. “It was just clear to me that—you know, in ‘Little Women’ they’re reading ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and putting out a newspaper and being unbelievably productive, and I was not like that. So I had this feeling of inferiority to past models with or without my mother’s criticisms.”

Partly in response to that feeling, Zink began keeping her writing to herself. In college, at William & Mary, in Williamsburg, she avoided English classes and studied philosophy instead—a decision that she now regards as a mistake, together with the past two hundred years of the discipline. Upon graduation, she stayed in Williamsburg and became intentionally homeless. “I didn’t have any money,” she says, “and I figured if you can talk somebody into storing your clothes you can sleep anywhere.” In her case, “anywhere” meant college lounges and the lobbies of public buildings.

Eventually, Zink found an apartment share that she could afford, partly because it was in a historically black neighborhood, and partly because, by then, she was employed. The position in question came about by accident; she had been on her way to apply for a job as a cocktail waitress when she ran into a bricklayer acquaintance, who offered to hire her instead. For the next four years, Zink worked as a bricklayer in the Tidewater region of Virginia. “That job was more valuable for my intellectual life than my entire college career,” she says. “In college, they allow you to be entertained and let your mind wander, which is not good training to do anything difficult.” Bricklaying, by contrast, cultivated discipline. When she started, she was teaching herself French by reading Sartre’s memoirs, “Les Mots,” with a dictionary in hand. The longer she worked in construction, she found, the longer she could stick with Sartre.