This urgency is palpable in Hustvedt's recent essay collection, Mothers, Fathers and Others. The author, who turns 67 this year, is well known for her conceptual novels that meditate on the purpose of art, pick apart our culture's insistence on binary gender roles, and rail against the denigration of female intellect and achievements. These preoccupations have also underpinned her voluminous non-fiction, which encompasses criticism on visual art and the powers of looking, reading and writing, as well her longstanding interests in neurology and psychology.

This latest collection is rigorous and fast-moving, swiftly moving from one train of thought to another. While a number of essays impart the sense that they are unfolding in real time, others are the products of her lifetime of reading, and her decades of engagement with particular authors. One is the anthropologist Mary Douglas, who famously theorised the cultural meanings of dirt and contamination in her enduring 1966 book Purity and Danger, which Hustvedt first encountered as a graduate student. There is also an essay on the difficulties of interpretation presented by Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which Hustvedt has been reading since she was 13. Throughout the collection, she also draws on her deep knowledge of psychoanalysis, deploying the theories of Freud, Klein, Winnicott and others at a rapid pace, often in the process of taking down the outdated or half-baked assertions of male cultural critics.

Mothers, Fathers and Others homes in on the sites our culture designates as borders. While Hustvedt challenges specific dichotomies - reality versus imagination, male versus female, self versus other, nature versus nurture - the overall target of her critique is the monolith of western scientific empiricism, which codified "absolute thresholds and clean division". Like Mary Douglas, Hustvedt is stimulated by the potential for fuzziness at the margins. She is particularly attentive to the intermingling of consciousness, perception and imagination, asserting that it "is not simple to draw a hard line between states of mind and our perceptions of the world, our memories of it, or our imaginative fantasies that draw from both perceiving and remembering". Nor between reality and fiction. "The future is a fiction," Hustvedt argues; it is something one imagines into being.

One of Hustvedt's recurring subjects is the power caregivers wield in shaping the mental and physical life of a child. Hustvedt is firmly against the primacy of nature, believing that "human beings are social animals that rely on other animals like ourselves to become ourselves". She is galvanised by Merleau-Ponty's concept of inter-corporeality, the notion that "human relations take place between and among bodies", and applies it to Louise Bourgeois in an illuminating essay on her work. It is also an apt description of her relationship with her husband, the author Paul Auster, with whom she shares "uncanny mental mirroring" after 40 years of co-habitation.

Hustvedt also seeks to demonstrate that our perceptions and social structures are mutually reinforcing, particularly when it comes to gender roles. Following Adrienne Rich, she recognises that there are two types of motherhood: potential motherhood, which contains all possible permutations of mother-child relationships, and the institution of motherhood, which is a patriarchal construct that ensures mothers remain under male control, and is responsible for the way "mother ideas invade mothering with a stark morality of good and evil that rarely touches fathering". She pays tribute to the mother figures in her life but also baulks at the idea that the nurturing role is exclusively the mother's domain. The title of the collection alludes to the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's 2009 book Mothers and Others: the Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, which argued that the human race has only survived due to cooperation, a trait that has become increasingly depleted with the advent of capitalism and its relegation of the care-giving role to women.

Unsurprisingly, Hustvedt is of the books-are-good-for-humanity school of thought, and evangelises about the capacity of fiction to promote empathy and pluralism. But, for a female fiction writer, being read in the first place can be a challenge. As a form dominated by women writers and readers both historically and in the present, literature has long been feminised; therefore, as Hustvedt suggests, men who claim not to read novels are unwilling to surrender to a woman's authority. Then there are those who believe women cannot possess "serious" intellect; she has been harangued repeatedly by readers who either think her husband writes her books, or that he had a significant role in her intellectual development. At one event, unfortunately in Australia but thankfully "a number of years ago", the journalist interviewing her labelled her husband's work "intellectual" and hers "domestic", an example of the "cultural fictions that drive how we read fiction".

Mothers, Fathers and Others is a bracing and wide-ranging collection that takes stock of all our intimate relationships, and traces them back to both the heart and the mind.