[2] In 1985, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. published the 25-year-old Eberstadt's first novel, Low Tide, which told the story of Jezebel, daughter of an English art dealer and a mad Louisiana heiress, and her fatal love affair with two young brothers.
Praise for her work landed her an interview with intellectual William F. Buckley on his television program, Firing Line, where she appeared with Bret Easton Ellis, who had published Less than Zero the same year.
Set in rural New Hampshire, the novel is about Isaac Hooker, a half-deaf, half-blind, hugely fat and ambitious boy-genius and his struggle to fulfill his parents' blighted dreams.
Eberstadt began writing essays and criticism for such publications as Commentary, The New Yorker, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair.
Her widely cited essay "The Palace and the City", about the Sicilian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and the politics of urban restoration in Palermo, was published in the December 23, 1991, issue of The New Yorker.
RAT tells the story of a 15 year-old girl who set off on a journey from rural France to London, with her adopted brother in search of her birth father and a better life.
Medwick hails Eberstadt's preoccupation with "the footloose life of the wilfully dispossessed" and writes that "in her novels, idealists and fast trackers wrestle with thorny problems of love and social identity."