She praises Prescott’s work ethic and devotion to the craft. “But also, frankly, I think she’s going to earn out her advance. She’s not going to be somebody who sold her book for a ton of money and then is going to be a commercial failure and wreck the rest of her career.” Rights to the novel have sold in 30 countries, and it was optioned in a major movie sale by Marc Platt Productions and The Ink Factory.

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Prescott has the slightly worried personality of a woman who went to 12 years of Catholic school and was raised by Pennsylvania parents who cautioned against taking oneself too seriously. She’s game to indulge in casting ideas with a reporter — what about Saoirse Ronan for the unlikely spy Irina or Michelle Williams for Pasternak’s long-suffering muse, Olga — without sounding invested in Hollywood machinations. She pokes fun at her self-serious expression in her author photo, explaining that when she fake-smiles for pictures she looks insane. She tears up a few times, like when she describes calling her parents with news of the Knopf deal. “I had this great career in politics and then I took this huge pay cut to go back to school,” she says. “And my poor dad said, ‘I’m just happy you’re going to be O.K.’”

With the sale of the book, Prescott seems to have built sensibly upon an already cheerful life. She and her husband Matt — who works for the Humane Society of the United States and recently published his own book, “Food Is the Solution” — bought their first home, a three-bedroom midcentury ranch with a pink and turquoise tiled bathroom and a writing shed in the backyard. They have two cats and a rescue puppy named Mo, and their close friends live down the block with a new baby they like to snuggle. Prescott is in a book club (they last discussed Toni Morrison’s “Sula”). There is comfort in living far from the publishing industry.

“I’m not going out to cocktail parties every night,” she says of her somewhat anonymous Texas existence. “There’s no sense of competition.”

Prescott is eager to pick the right rabbit hole to fall into for her next project. She’s already started researching the Federal Writers’ Project, the Depression-era program that paid literary greats like Zora Neale Hurston and John Cheever to go out looking for American tales. She’s fascinated by the world of fake news — who writes it, and why and how it spreads. She’d love to chronicle her dream candidate Elizabeth Warren on the campaign trail if she were to get the nomination.

There’s also the reality that she’s now being sent advance copies of books hopeful for a blurb from a famous writer. Her! It’d be easy to let this flush of a time go to one’s head. But there’s a difference between ego and self-possession. When asked what she’s proudest of in all this, Prescott says, “I wrote a book that I would love to read. And that my sister and mom would want to read. What more can you do?”

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