TORONTO -- Ann-Marie MacDonald made a carefully calculated decision to showcase Toronto in her new novel "Adult Onset," which includes hyper-detailed descriptions of coffee shops, convenience stores and hipster lingerie boutiques in the city's Annex neighbourhood.

"I thought: 'Gee I'm going for it here. I'm really going to set it here, here's Bathurst and Bloor and this may or may not fly with people,"' the acclaimed author said in a recent interview. "Because everyone likes to kick Toronto around. Like, internationally we're known for some very important things but we're not known for our neighbourhoods. And the rest of Canada likes to resent us for some fantasy of what they think Toronto is."

At this point, her thespian background kicks in: "Folks, just come to Toronto and quit the Toronto bashing," MacDonald beseeches. "It's not simply the marvellous city of the Toronto film festival ... it's also a city of neighbourhoods. "

Inhabiting those neighbourhoods in "Adult Onset" (Knopf Canada) is MacDonald's protagonist, Mary Rose MacKinnon, a successful author whose career is on hold as she navigates the grindingly relentless routine of caring for her two small children and a dog while her partner Hilary is out West directing a play. Amid a fatigued haze of tantrums, meal-making and mundane chores, Mary Rose (whose family call her "Mister") ruminates on the past, and how her parents dealt with a childhood health issue that still nags.

Fans of MacDonald have been eagerly anticipating the novel, the author's first since 2003's Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted "The Way the Crow Flies." She's been far from idle in the interim, busy with film and theatre work, hosting CBC's "The Doc Zone" and raising two children with her partner, playwright and theatre director Alisa Palmer (the family is currently living in Montreal).

While some authors balk at questions about whether their fiction is biographical, the issue seems unavoidable with "Adult Onset," which took four years to write. MacDonald chuckles at the query, saying it's one she's fielded for every one of her books -- including her 1996 debut novel, the Oprah Winfrey-anointed period drama "Fall on Your Knees."

"The truth is that they're all autobiographical," said MacDonald. "I was at a cottage late in the summer and someone said: 'Who said: 'Fiction is personal experience transformed'? And I perked up and I said: 'Well I think I did, or I'm going to.' And someone else said: 'It was (Trinidadian writer) V.S. Naipaul who said that.' And I said: 'Well close enough, it's now going to be my quote.' What else are we working with?"

MacDonald, 55, is not suggesting the events in her books "concretely happened," just that they are her "portal onto this world." She calls "Adult Onset" an "extraordinary challenge," before asking permission to describe her process in theatrical terms.

"It's almost like I thought: 'I am going to do something very low-tech, I am not going to have a lot of lighting, props, set, costume, ....bare stage, almost a one-woman show," she said. "Acoustic, there's a stool in the middle of the stage."

But, she added: "Anytime ... you think you're seeing the back wall of the theatre, you think you're seeing a bare stage, you think you're seeing the absence of artifice, it's not true."

The experience of "Adult Onset" clearly wasn't an easy one; the author jokes that if she ever writes another book, it'll be set "in a land far away in a time long ago."

Despite her long list of accolades, MacDonald confesses to being "tremendously nervous" about the novel's release, which includes a book trailer, something she's wanted to do since "Fall on Your Knees." She's also excited about discussing her work publicly, saying the book "doesn't exist" until it's being read.

And, she's looking forward to introducing readers to Toronto through her loving descriptions of its neighbourhoods, something she considers a "gift to the people who care" about the city and an "invitation" to those who don't know it well.

Said the author: "One book feeds another and another and another until we build up an image bank, such that down the line, a reader in the Netherlands comes to the corner of Bathurst and Bloor and has a sense of what that is."