“The best ideas outrun me. That’s why I write,” Durga Chew-Bose muses in the opening essay of her first book, Too Much and Not the Mood. The relatively slim volume is packed with 14 evocative pieces that evidence that chase – from her childhood growing up in Montreal to her 20s in Brooklyn.

Just as Joan Didion homes in on small physical details, Chew-Bose loves painstakingly specific descriptions. In the sprawling, 90-page essay Heart Museum – named after an emoji – colours are “shell-pink” and a “lathery shade of peach”; a glass window doesn’t shatter, it is “veined”.

Also like Didion, Chew-Bose mines the content of her life for her writing. While the events recorded – Chew-Bose’s father has heart surgery, she takes a rickshaw ride in Mumbai, a friend gives her a Build-A-Bear heart – are wildly tangential, they are drawn together by a central motif of hearts. The gauzy, atmospheric mood that permeates her writing invites a reading experience more akin to listening to rainfall on a tile roof than hearing a song with a catchy chorus. Since there is often no decipherable beginning, middle, or end in these essays, it’s best to steep in a passage, rather than attempt to swim through to the other side.

We meet for breakfast at an old-timey diner in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she is living for a semester while teaching at Sarah Lawrence, her alma mater. The syllabus for the class – a writing workshop called On Not Writing – is stacked with writers like Lydia Davis, Anaïs Nin, Sarah Manguso, who share Chew-Bose’s self-referential, probing writing style. “I don’t want [my students to write] traditional first-person narrative essays,” she says. “I want them to run before they can walk.” The class celebrates the kinds of writing – list-making, letter-writing, etc – that sustain and inform an enduring creative life.

The title comes from a line in Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary that Chew-Bose once underlined and Instagrammed; Woolf was frustrated with the pressure she felt to adjust her writing for her readers. Before Chew-Bose signed her book deal, an editor friend remarked that it should be the name of her first book. “I just liked the sequence of words,” Chew-Bose says. “Doesn’t it sound like a jazz album?”

In consolidating these essays – five of which were previously published – into book form, “there was no map or blueprint,” she says. “There was no big box in my room full of papers and journals and quotes and napkins with scribbles on them. There was no list that I was checking off.” If she is taken by someone or some object while walking or at the movies, she usually writes a note in her phone and emails it to herself. “I don’t really believe in writing as catharsis, but so much of it for me is trying to make sense of why I’m drawn to things. I love overthinking what turns me on.”

After living away from her parents for the past 13 years, she moved back to Montreal – where they both live – while writing this book. “There’s a certain type of adult who really romanticises proximity to parents, and I’m one of those people,” she says, adding that she views her collection as a gift to her mother. “I hope that it makes [my family] feel closer to me,” she says. “No matter how close you are to your family, you still don’t know how your daughter interprets the world.”

While some of the book touches on growing up as a first-generation kid in a predominately white neighbourhood, in others she expresses her feeling of displacement living in the US as a Canadian. “I felt strained living in the US for so long,” she says. “I felt temporary [in New York], and the temporariness of it was bubbling over for me.” She came to appreciate privileges she had previously taken for granted, like universal healthcare: “It changes who you are as a person, to grow up in a country where you don’t have to prove to the world you’re human to deserve those things.”

As Chew-Bose explains, the practice of writing requires “leaving the world behind, so you can hold fast to what’s strange inside, what’s unlit.” It follows then that the writer, perhaps like the reader, enjoys a certain degree of solitude and introspection. “Most of the women in my life are half-present because part of us is elsewhere. Whether it’s for self-preservation, or to get through the day, or [the nature of] being an introvert with a social life, we’re never 100% there.” In writing this book, she wanted to capture “that life that you’re living alongside your life”.

“When you’re on a deadline or reviewing a book or something, depending on the publication, there’s a voice you have to write, and for a specific readership. But with a book, it was really about becoming myself, or at least writing without the noise of expectation and audience,” she explains. “I write to four or five people my life and that’s it.”

Some readers will find that Chew-Bose relies on the descriptive power of her prose to the detriment of a narrative thrust, but this is only a problem if you’re a reader that finds plot-averse writing to be befuddling, or her lyrical style overwrought. But for some other readers, including myself, it is a delight to slip into someone else’s busy mind, take a look around, and find profound resonances.

“My writing often starts somewhere and goes to seven other places and then comes back,” Chew-Bose explains. “I like non-endings that feel final.”

• Too Much and Not the Mood is published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Durga Chew-Bose is appearing at Sydney writers’ festival in May 2017