LOS ANGELES — Few of Rachel Kushner’s artworks were purchased outright. While her Angelino Heights Craftsman-style home, where she lives with her husband, Jason Smith, and their son, Remy , may be an intimately scaled who’s who of contemporary art — including West Coast painters like James Hayward and Laura Owens and New Yorkers like Seth Price and Richard Prince — most of these pieces were received in exchange for her writing.

Ms. Kushner is best known for her wryly brooding novels — “Telex From Cuba” and “The Flamethrowers,” as well as “The Mars Room,” whose prose Dwight Garner of The New York Times compared to a “muscle car oozing down the side roads of your mind.” But she has simultaneously built a sideline as a feature writer on artists for publications like Artforum, as well as an essayist for exhibition catalogs .

When she came to New York from San Francisco in 1996, at 2 7, she became friends with the painter Alex Brown and subsequently took a deep dive into the downtown art scene. Even after entering Columbia’s M.F.A. writing program , she maintained this affinity: “Artists just seemed more fun and interesting to hang out with,” she said. “They knew a lot about music, they read architecture criticism, they read philosophy. I just felt like I always learned more from being around them socially.”