Elinor Lipman writes funny novels — and she’s proud of that. "There was a time, a long time ago," she says, "when I’d be offended when somebody said, ‘Think you’ll ever write a serious novel?’ And now I just think that what they meant was, ‘Think you’ll ever write a novel that doesn’t make anybody laugh?’" Still, the Lowell native has received plenty of love from readers and critics over the years for her comedy-of-manners novels; in reviews, she’s been likened to a modern-day Jane Austen, and in 2001 she won the New England Book Award for fiction.

Lipman is a bona fide writing-class success story, having taken a stab at fiction in a Brandeis class in 1979, when she was 28. Two years later, she had her first short story published, and in 1987, Viking published a collection of her stories, Into Love and Out Again. In Lipman’s latest and seventh novel, The Pursuit of Alice Thrift (Random House), narrator Alice tells the story of how she, a self-admittedly socially clueless resident at a Boston hospital, came to marry and then divorce a sleazy fudge salesman named Raymond Russo. Lipman writes in the opening chapter that the New York Times Vows section "should revisit their brides and grooms a year later, or five or ten. I’d enjoy that on a Sunday morning — scanning the wedding announcements stenciled with updates: NOT SPEAKING. DIVORCED. SEPARATED. ANNULLED. CHEATING ON HIM WITH THE POOL-MAINTENANCE GUY.... Ray’s and mine could have multiple stamps, like a passport. It could say DIDN’T LAST THE HONEYMOON or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. Or, across his conniving forehead, above that hideous nose, succinctly and aptly, LIAR."

In Lipman’s own life, she’s happily married to a radiologist (she hit up her husband for the obscure medical references in the novel), with a son at Columbia University. We spoke at her home in Northampton.

Q: Many of your protagonists start out being very much alone in the world, and in The Pursuit of Alice Thrift, Alice comes right out and admits how lonely she is. What attracts you to this type of character?

A: I find those characters compelling, sympathetic. In books that are generally seen as comedic, I find that the best place to get my footing is with a really deadpan and somewhat sad character. So it’s not a jokester, and it’s not someone with high self-esteem. [Those characters] seem to be in those books out there — I haven’t read them, but I’m just guessing — about the editors and young career women in New York. That’s not my material. [With my characters] I think part of it is the distance they have to travel, and the role I can play in saving them. You know, if I’m going to be a god of some fictional world, I might as well pick someone I can save — or send to charm school.

Q: In the new novel, Alice is so completely socially awkward, and Ray is such a sleaze. While still true to life, it seems as if you’ve upped the comic ante.

A: You’re right.... I generally get very nice reviews, but if there’s a complaint, it’s "I enjoyed this book so much, read it cover to cover, but I really wanted to be reading Proust." And my feeling was, if there were those comedic parts the overly earnest reader was complaining about, then that’s exactly who I don’t want to write for.... I made a conscious decision to make this more antic.

Q: Do you wonder or worry if men are reading your novels?

A: I don’t worry. I recognize the fact that more women read novels than men do.... You say to your editor when you see the mock-up for your [book] jacket, "Ooh, but do you think a man would pick it up?" They say facetiously, "Men don’t read novels." And they say it half facetiously, but the figures show.... I went to hear Arthur Golden. Memoirs of a Geisha was still in hardcover, and there were probably 100 people there, standing room only, and there were probably two men. So when I [do] readings and it’s mostly women, I know that that’s true for so many people.

Q: A lot of people take fiction-writing classes, and nothing ever comes of it. But you’re a success story. Tell me about taking classes.

A: I wasn’t writing fiction at all. I was writing full-time for the Mass. Teachers Association.... And I took this course at Brandeis. The first things I passed in got sort of a nice reaction in class, but now I wouldn’t be able to read them, let alone publish them. It was just this perfect combination of an encouraging teacher who really did see something ... and the class was very supportive. So I did go to classes, but they were sort of different permutations of the same group; it started at Brandeis, went to various places, and ended up in a church in Wellesley. [I did try another class] with another teacher, sort of famous, and if I didn’t have the cushion of the enthusiasm of the first class, I would have given it up. The teacher was somewhat encouraging, but the class was not. Once a story of mine was read, and [the teacher said to the class], "So what would you do with this?" and someone said, "Throw it in the fire."

Q: Did the class know whose story it was?

A: They knew it was me. And the interesting thing is that this woman has since asked for some help, and even though she loomed very large in my mind as the meanest person I’d ever been in a writing class with, she had no memory of that, so it just goes to show you.

Q: So, did you help her?

A: No.

Q: Do you workshop your work around now, show it to anybody as you write?

A: Two people. One is Stacy Schiff, who was my first editor at Viking, and I followed her to Pocket for Then She Found Me, and she left right before it came out and became a biographer, and now I can say famous biographer [for Véra: Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov]. She’s the most fabulous writer, and she’s the most fabulous editor. So Stacy gets every chapter, as does [novelist] Mameve Medwed. They’re sort of a wonderful good-cop/bad-cop situation because Mameve reads it instantaneously and calls up just ecstatic. "I loved it! I loved it! I thought I never could love a character as much as Alice Thrift!" And Stacy, who has three small children, or smallish, takes a little longer and then she sends it back all hand copyedited and line edited, and will make suggestions, cross things out of mine. And the agreement we have essentially is: she suggests it, and I may or may not take it. Because we understand that [when] you cross something out or write something else in, all you’re really doing is substituting your judgment for someone else’s, and sometimes it’s better and it’s sometimes it’s not.

Q: Your books have happy endings, though they might be a little bit bittersweet. Why?

A: I actually think that when a writer — and I would say quite likely a male writer or maybe a female writer who's trying to be a tough guy — when they resist sort of wrapping things up in what I would consider to be to the satisfaction of the reader, which in my case is sort of to my own satisfaction, I think that there’s some kind of literary fashion going on. I think that when our ancestors were sitting around the campfire in the cave, and someone said, "Listen to this, this is a really good story," and if they then said, "So this happened and then this happened and then they met, and we leave and we see them, they’re just staring at the river." People would say, "What kind of story is that?" Our human nature is to have an ending to a story. And since I’m the god of this world, you know, who would drown their children, right?

Q: Is there ever talk of taking one of your books to Hollywood?

A: Oh, all the time. I have 100 of what I would consider stupid Hollywood stories. The Ladies’ Man was optioned, and it got as far as several drafts of a screenplay. [In the book] there are three sisters: one of them works for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; one of them owns her own lingerie store in a Harbor Towers kind of place on the ocean; and one of them raises money for WGBH. So, by the time it got to the last draft before the plug was pulled, the lingerie owner stayed — that was sexy enough for Hollywood. The one who worked for the Commonwealth, she became a ticket scalper, and the one who was a fundraiser became a vet. But not any kind of vet. An ocular vet because the producer had two boxers of the dog variety. So this is the kind of thing — how can you take it seriously?

Elinor Lipman reads at the Brookline Booksmith on June 19, at 7 p.m., and at Borders Books and Music, in Framingham, on July 8, at 7:30 p.m. Mark Bazer can be reached at mebazer@yahoo.com