Williams talks like a Joy Williams character; in our time together, she was extremely reticent, yet on several occasions she burst out with a revelation so breathtakingly personal that I, too, laughed nervously. The rhythms of our conversation — chitchat punctuated by silence interrupted by exclamations of despair and rage — were like none I’d ever had before. Once, to my horror, I found myself asking her how she’d like to die. She replied instantly: ‘‘A car crash! It’s quick.’’

Williams met her first husband, Fred McCormack, while she was attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. They moved to Florida, where he worked as a reporter, and they had a daughter, Caitlin. Williams wrote in a trailer outside Tallahassee where they lived for a time and that she would portray in her story ‘‘Woods’’: ‘‘The place smelled of cigarettes and mice that wouldn’t be trapped. The paneled walls bent to the touch.’’ She would later recall that living situation as ‘‘excellent, practically morbid conditions for the writing of a first novel.’’

By the time that novel, ‘‘State of Grace,’’ was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974, Williams had divorced McCormack and married L. Rust Hills, the longtime fiction editor at Esquire; he soon adopted her daughter. Even as she settled into a 30-plus-year marriage, Williams wrote fiction that viewed love with a gimlet eye; her characters find love with the wrong people, worry when they’re away, are casually cruel when they return. They yearn for passion, yet don’t know what to do with it. The young woman adrift at the center of ‘‘The Lover’’ (1974), mid-affair, ‘‘wants to be in love,’’ Williams writes. ‘‘Her face is thin with the thinness of a failed lover. It is so difficult!’’

In that same story, the young woman drops her daughter off at nursery school to go sailing with her lover and, when she returns, has trouble recognizing her child: ‘‘There are so many children, after all, standing in the rooms, all the same size, all small, quizzical creatures.’’ Williams is close to her grown daughter and grandson, and spoke of her daughter’s easygoing childhood near the beach in Florida. But an ambivalence about parenting percolates through her work. She seems, in the tension between parents and their offspring, to take the side of the children; she has a keen sense of their desires and the small crimes they will commit to achieve them. ‘‘All children fib a little,’’ she writes in her story ‘‘The Excursion.’’ ‘‘Their lives are incompatible with the limits imposed upon their experience.’’

Williams and Hills eventually settled in Key West. Far from the New York literary scene, they cultivated their own community of writers and threw parties at their house on Pine Street. Even within this more social milieu, Williams recalled, she often sneaked away early and went to bed. Her boozy and mysterious second novel, ‘‘The Changeling’’ (1978), takes up the interplay between interior lives and the natural world: On a tiny island off the Atlantic coast, people rut in the grass like animals, neigh like horses, bite and scratch. In one memorable scene, a girl transforms for just an instant into a deer, her flanks ‘‘covered with tight, bright fur.’’

The novel was — as Dwight Garner, a New York Times book critic, later put it — ‘‘burned and then buried alive’’ by Anatole Broyard in The Times. ‘‘He jumped publication date!’’ Williams said indignantly of Broyard. ‘‘He couldn’t wait to screw me.’’ Williams, stung by the review, didn’t publish her third novel, ‘‘Breaking and Entering,’’ until 1988; the restless tale of a pair of wanderers who break into vacation houses while their owners are up north, it reads now like an X-ray of its era — anomic, ominous. The Florida beach exists to be seen through bay windows by the foolish snowbirds who live behind them.