Yet she did not begin writing until late in her college career. “I was reluctant to start writing in college because it was my dad’s thing,” she explains, adding that his style “is very different than mine.”

Though she was heavily involved in theater at Harvard, Delbanco chose not to act in New York. “I made a calculated decision about my future and happiness,” she explains. “The truth of writing is you can do it when you do other things.” This was not true with acting, she realized, as without a successful audition and a part “you’re not an actor.”

At the same time she also realized that graduate school would be somewhat of an inevitability, even though she liked her job at Seventeen. Her first job at the magazine was not, as her character Rosalie summed up someone in an entry-level jobs as “assistant-ish looking person holding a stack of manila folders.”

“That was a great experience,” Delbanco says of Seventeen, “I got to travel to a different high school in America and write a story about it.”

Nonetheless, she says at one point she asked herself, “am I really going to be a staff writer at Seventeen?”

Delbanco cites Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Wharton, Diane Johnson and Charles Baxter as some authors she admires, with Jane Austen her “favorite author of all time.” Though she defers energetically from comparing herself to the latter, Delbanco admits that much of her writing borrows from Austen’s techniques.

“I still think a novel can have a happy ending,” she says.

—Staff writer Joseph L. Dimento can be reached at dimento@fas.harvard.edu.