One day, Katie Kitamura was intrigued by a headline that declared, “A stranger told me he was my son.”

She chose not to read the story, preferring instead to ponder the unusual idea that a woman could have a son who is a stranger. She mentioned it to a friend with older children, who said, “That’s just what parenting is. Every time my son comes home from college, it’s like a stranger has come back into the house.”

And so, the “emotional core” of Kitamura’s new novel, “Audition,” was born. “People can have this intense familiarity and intimacy with their children — and this powerful sense of estrangement — and they are designed to coexist,” she says.

At the start of the novel, the unnamed narrator, a successful actress, is approached by a young man, Xavier, who believes he’s her son … except she’s never had any children. Still, the man insinuates himself into the actress’s life by becoming an assistant to the director of the play she is starring in.

In the play, the actress is struggling with a moment in the middle when everything shifts and the character changes so dramatically that it seems as if she becomes someone else, a stranger to herself.

And echoing this in the novel, there’s a moment in the middle when everything shifts and the actress does have a son, this Xavier, and he wants to come back to live at home, throwing the domestic life she and her husband have established out of rhythm.

While Kitamura doesn’t let the reader know what is or isn’t real within the novel, she did, however, discuss all these ideas in a recent video conversation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q In the novel, the narrator thinks she and Xavier are being judged by strangers in a restaurant and then later in the street. Was her perception correct or was she, as an actress, too self-conscious and in her own imagination?

A It’s hard to say because everything is very much inside her head. It was important to me to try to establish this idea of interpretation as being key to the book. I am interested in the way that we form ourselves in relation to external judgment or assessment, whether we like it or not, and how variable that assessment and interpretation can be.

Q Did this change the way you observe people in similar scenarios?

A It’s so funny because the truth is, I’m really not that observant. My children and my husband are more observant than I am. We’ll always be walking down the street, and my son will say, “Can you believe that?” And I never see it. I’m in my head.

The only place where I feel myself to be observant is when I’m writing. There, I feel like I’m able to apprehend at a pace and with the sensitivity that I unfortunately am not able to do in my everyday life. That’s one of the reasons that I love writing so much.

Q Is she an unreliable narrator to us — or to herself?

A She experiences herself as unreliable, particularly in the second half of the novel. There is a lot of her questioning what might’ve happened in the past and questioning her understanding of who she is. I think that transmits into an unreliability to the reader.As she’s cycling through different roles in her domestic life, she sees that it’s a script and sees the essential flimsiness of it. She even says that the construct of the family that’s enacted has a faulty script. That feeds directly into the kind of instability that she feels in her life.

Q Do you worry about whether the reader will connect to a character for whom reality changes halfway through the book and who feels disconnected from herself?

A You need to be able to get the reader to identify with your character, but not always relate to them. With this story, I hope the reader is willing to make that jump with me. But I knew it was a risk. It’s not the standard way of telling a story, and it’s not the standard form for a novel.

One of the things I thought about when I was writing was, what is the purpose of plot?

There’s a sense in contemporary fiction that writers are less interested in plot, that there’s something about the construction of plot that feels too artificial. I love plot and have read genre books my entire life. Plot is very difficult and an extraordinary tool that is foundational to storytelling. But in this particular case, I wanted to see if I could take structure and form and use that to do some of the work that is typically done by plot.

There’s a meta-textual quality where the structure of the play she acts in is a guide to the structure of the novel itself. So the sense that the novel is performing the play in some way, in a funny way. So, in the middle of the book is something that I hope feels almost like a plot twist, even though it’s not. There’s no kind of event that has happened. There’s no revelation, in a way. It is a shift in form, but I’m hoping that that creates the kind of energy that you need to get the reader from the start of the book to the end of the book.

Q Did you want the reader to feel off balance when the second half begins?

A It was a hard book to edit, because obviously I know things about the first half that the reader doesn’t necessarily know. I hoped it could be interpreted in a couple of different ways, so that this question of which is reality and which is theater, and which is not, could be read either way. You could think the first half was real, or you could think the second half was the reality, and that required writing scenes and moments and sentences that had the capacity to hold two meanings at once.

David Lynch was a big influence on the book. You can find psychological explanations for a lot of what is happening in any Lynch movie. But on some level, that’s almost not the point. The point is the strangeness of it. When I was writing the book, I wanted that strangeness, that moving in between worlds that he does all the time. The novel to me is about experiences that are incommensurable in some fundamental way.