Miranda Popkey’s protagonist reckons with “the folly of governing narratives.” Photograph by Elena Seibert

Miranda Popkey’s début novel, “Topics of Conversation,” opens in Italy, in 2000. The unnamed narrator, twenty-one and set to begin graduate coursework in the fall, has been brought along on a wealthy friend’s family vacation. She’s the babysitter. One evening, after the children are asleep, their mother, Artemisia, a formidable psychoanalyst who was born in Argentina, joins the narrator on the hotel terrace. Prompted by a bottle of wine, a pack of cigarettes, and the narrator’s talk of a recent breakup, she is soon recounting the events that hastened the collapse of an earlier marriage. The narrator, mesmerized by the older woman’s poise, the conviction of her self-knowledge, listens but barely speaks.

Artemisia’s story is about power: who has it and why, how it animates and shapes desire. The story’s dénouement may or may not warrant the label of rape. Artemisia doesn’t use that word. The word she does use is “violence.” Her husband showed her his strength, pushing her against the wall, one hand on her shoulder, one on her neck. But, instead of fear, it was appreciation and relief that overwhelmed her: appreciation because he had restored to their relationship the power hierarchy that she preferred, relief because she had been “released from control.” This is a startling opening scene, but what startles most is not, as one might expect, the husband’s display of brutality. It’s the vast disparity, the deep conflict, between Artemisia’s desire for absolute narrative control and her desire for sexual submission.

Toward the middle of the book, some fourteen years after this Italian vacation, the same disparity crops up once more—but here it’s the narrator who internalizes it. Of the intervening years, we have learned that she married and abruptly divorced a kale-loving man, a classmate in her grad-school cohort, whom she describes as “nice” and “ever so understanding.” She is mocking him. He is exactly the kind of partner a liberated woman is supposed to want, and yet she despises him for it. Divorced and living with her young son in California, the narrator has assembled a group of other single mothers. Again, there is wine and talk. This time, it is the narrator who holds forth, carefully unfurling her own story. She recites it with a dramatic sense of remove; with time, the narrative has accrued significance, like rust on iron left in the damp. The story takes place in a hotel room. She is twenty—“an adult,” she makes explicit, if still a college student—when she begins an affair with a married professor in his early forties. The hotel is where they spend their first night together. He pushes her, fully clothed, face-first onto the bed, then sets one hand on her back and one on her neck and presses down. He steps back. When she twitches, he says, “Don’t fucking move.” Maybe twenty minutes pass before he orders her to get up. They do not have sex. “The whole time he was watching me,” she reveals to her audience of other mothers, “I didn’t have to do anything. There were no choices to make.” She liked it. She would never have known to ask for it.

This contrast—of women raring to assert their agency in one context, then willing, even eager, to relinquish it another—captured my interest in part because of its familiarity. I’d seen it crop up recently in widely praised works both written by and featuring brazen, outspoken, and almost always middle-class white women. It’s in Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends,” when Frances tries unsuccessfully to get Nick—older, married, kind—to choke and hit her during sex. And in Rooney’s “Normal People,” when Marianne discloses to gentle, sensitive Connell, her on-again-off-again boyfriend, that another man has hit her with a belt, choked her—that she asked for it, enjoyed it. It’s also in the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series “Fleabag,” when Fleabag confesses—literally—to the priest she lusts after. All she truly wants is someone (by implication him, or maybe Him) to tell her “what to wear every morning,” to instruct her on “what to like, what to hate, what to rage about . . . what to believe in . . . how to live my life.”

These scenes both do and do not seem like ordinary kink. All sex, of course, is psychological, but the source of the charge here is more than just a dom-sub mind game. What vitalizes them is the friction of the characters’ incongruent desires: on the one hand, to embrace the simplicity of someone else’s authority; on the other, to assert their own authorship. Popkey’s narrator, though not a writer, has a literary sensibility—her dissertation is on “female pain in Jacobean revenge tragedies,” and her idea of a beach read is “The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962”—and it’s on masterly display in the scene with the single moms. Like a plotting author, she engineers a game: they will go around in a circle relaying their origin stories, the narrative that explains how they got to this place, “with the wine and the kid and the no partner, the moment when that became inevitable.” It’s a premise that grants her permission to deliver a personal monologue, to test-drive the story of her becoming. She tweaks some of the facts (instead of a student, she’s an intern; instead of a professor, he’s a peer), but she is emphatic in the authority of what she’s saying. She tells the single moms that “there’s a line” through her life, and “it runs straight from that hotel room.”

Does she believe all this? Is she trying to make herself believe it? Years earlier, listening to Artemisia, she envied the older woman’s narrative control: “I, at twenty-one, did not, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my life. Had not yet realized the folly of governing narratives.” And yet, a part of her seems to hope authorial mastery will overcome personal folly: “of course life is random, a series of coincidences, etc., but . . . to live you must attempt to make sense of it, and that’s what narrative’s for.” Maybe if she tells the narrative well enough it will be true. And, if it is true, then maybe she can finally be coherent; the past decisions that perplex her most, those moments that reek of self-sabotage or that hurt people she loves, were all along foreordained, set in motion by that catalyzing moment. Even if she had tried to, she could never have done anything otherwise. The right narrative, she understands, can release her of responsibility.

Rooney’s Frances and Marianne and Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag share with Popkey’s narrator a literary proclivity, which can also manifest as an anxiety. They, too, want to assemble the type of story that is also a kind of proof. Frances gets her first story published in the course of the novel, Marianne is bookish and academically successful, and they are both so-called digital natives. For them, communicating through text and e-mail, Facebook and I.M.—which is to say through writing—is as instinctive as speech, sometimes preferable to it. “I had been so terribly noisy and theatrical all the way through,” Frances worries after sleeping with Nick the first time, “that it was impossible now to act indifferent like I did in e-mails.” To be online is to craft—and control—a persona, however deliberate, however fussed over, however much it resembles (or not) one’s I.R.L. self. Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag is likewise aware of her audience—not an online one, although all of us watching at home are, in a sense, her followers—and may in fact be the one who’s most invested in authorial control. When she turns to the camera, to us, with direct narration, her clever quips and wry asides annotate and editorialize the plot. We are not observers of a neutral story unfolding; we are observers of a story unfolding the way she wants it to.