Nell Zink is the American author of The Wallcreeper and Mislaid, both of which were published to wide critical acclaim. Her new novel, Nicotine, is about political activism, family and falling in love.

Nicotine satirises a group of young political activists. Why?
I don’t think of it as satire because I like those people. I think of politically active, politically involved people as the salt of the earth. They’re my favourite people. They can’t achieve a lot, we know that, so they’re trapped in an eternal structural irony. And if you talk about reality it sounds like satire – look at the Trump campaign.

So would you say it’s playful rather than satirical?
They are themselves satirists when they talk about how smokers are made into scapegoats. People raising children in a big city surrounded by cars and illegal drugs will yell at you for lighting a cigarette.

Are you a smoker?
No, I never have been. Possibly because the day I turned 12, my mother said to me: “Nell, you’re 12 now, you’re old enough to smoke so you can start any time you want, but please come to me first to let me show you how, so you don’t look like a fool.” After that, I was never interested in smoking.

Nicotine contains some beautiful observations about grief. Where do those insights come from?
In 2012 my mother died and so I had some experiences I wish I never had. I discovered that writing something down doesn’t help, but writing it down and giving it to somebody to read helps, no matter what terrible thing has happened to me.

So are your novels coded autobiographies?
They’re no different from anybody else’s novels in that way. You can’t write about things that have nothing to do with you. You write about your own life or nothing.

Jonathan Franzen famously championed your work after you wrote him a letter about endangered birds and the two of you began corresponding. How much influence has he had on your career?
In a sense he’s the alpha and the omega. I mean, really, without him I would not have published anything. He leaned on me, he pressured me, he encouraged me. And his writing came to influence me: the more I was writing, the more I came to appreciate what he’s doing on a technical level. I don’t always like his material, or his approach to it politically, but he’s not quite as stodgy and square as he makes out to be in his books.

Is Franzen still your first reader?
It depends on what I’m writing. It could be [Israeli writer] Avner Shats or Franzen. Franzen and I might be on the same wavelength, but he doesn’t want to be on anybody’s wavelength. He’s always looking for a way out. The minute there’s harmony he gets nervous. With Franzen, if I stray just one degree from absolute tactful care in the things I say to him, he gets all miffy. But I have to have a particular audience in mind because if I try writing for the world at large I choke immediately because I’m not sure the world at large likes me at all.

Which authors have had the greatest influence on your own writing?
Probably Robert Walser, who I started reading in German 30 years ago. And then very recently I finally read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, which I wish I’d read 30 years ago. It’s maybe the first book I ever read where the protagonist is a woman and I totally identified with her as a hero.

Are there any genres you steer clear of in your own reading?
I can’t read books that give me nightmares. If a book has zombies in the title I do not open it, or if I know something is going to be wilfully gruesome. I don’t like reading graphic violence. I’m not a prissy person: I just have some aesthetic principles and I don’t think people should be pandering to all our worst instincts when we have so many good instincts.

Nicotine is published by HarperCollins (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £12.29