As much as I missed Zadie, I was prepared to wait a year or two until she reappeared. But by May her new book was finished. One of the first things I ask her, therefore, is how she wrote it so fast. “I went to therapy,” Zadie says jokingly, but she soon grows serious and explains, “I’ve always felt very cringe-y about myself. Fiction is a useful way of getting around it or disguising oneself one way or another. Not being able to write in the first person was very much about that, and self-disgust or anxiety about saying ‘I.’ I used to sit in front of the computer and have a very tough time writing, and I just noticed, once I was in therapy, I didn’t find it so difficult to write.”

Like a good therapist I say nothing, only murmur, encouraging her to continue. And then Zadie says something I don’t expect, something much more surprising than her previous admission: “It did seem to me, when I was a kid and also now that I’m a grown-up writer, that a lot of male writers have a certainty that I have never been able to have. I kept on thinking I would grow into it, but I’m never sure I’m doing the right thing.”

Recently, a number of novels by women have investigated the nature of female subjectivity. Sheila Heti’s “How Should A Person Be?” and, in a more astringent mode, Rachel Cusk’s “Outline,” present female subjectivity as fragmentary or contingent. In order to dramatize such internal disarray, Heti paints a Cubist portrait of herself from shards of memory, taped conversations, lists and dialogue, while Cusk removes her narrator from direct scrutiny altogether, allowing her to take shape as a curiously empty space formed by the currents of talk that swirl around her. The impetus behind such experiments, as Zadie’s comment suggests, comes from the idea that the authority a male writer assumes doesn’t originate in himself but in the structure of society, which he inherits like a mantle, but which slips from the shoulders of a woman, or just feels ridiculous to wear.

Objections to this theory come readily to mind, foremost the existence of women writers who are happily authoritarian; but also, the likelihood that the same anxiety bedevils male novelists as well. The machinery of omniscient narration can feel as clunky in my hands as, I suspect, it does in Zadie’s, for the simple reason that we inhabit the same literary moment. Cusk’s assertion that “autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts” is an extreme, even absolutist, position. Certainly some of the most intelligent recent fiction has either strong or veiled autobiographical elements, whether you’re thinking about Karl Ove Knausgaard, W.G. Sebald or Cusk herself. On the other hand, is there no way to mine one’s own emotional and biographical terrain for ore with which to construct other lives? Would Tolstoy or Shakespeare, alive today, only write about themselves?

Before I get the chance to discuss these questions with Zadie, there’s a problem with our connection.

“You’re cutting out so badly,” she says. “Should we phone?”

“Okay, let’s just go to audio.”

“Let’s try that.”