CANR
WORK TITLE: The Vulnerables
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.sigridnunez.com/
CITY: New York
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 228
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PERSONAL
Born March 12, 1951, in New York, NY.
EDUCATION:Barnard College, B.A., 1972; Columbia University, M.F.A., 1975.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. New School for Social Research (now New School University), New York, NY, faculty; Boston University, Boston, MA, creative writing faculty, 2011. Has taught at Amherst College, Columbia University, Princteon University, and Smith College. Writer-in-residence, Sarah Lawrence College, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, 2006, and Vassar College, 2012. Member of faculty, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Rope Walk Writer’s Retreat. Resident, Lannan Foundation.
MEMBER:American Academy of Arts and Letters.
AWARDS:Best novel of the year, Association for Asian American Studies, for A Feather on the Breath of God; Rome Prize Fellow in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2000-01; literature fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2003; Holzbrinck Berlin Prize Fellow, American Academy in Berlin, 2005; Whiting Writer’s Award; two American Academy of Arts and Letters awards; Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, for Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury; Fiction Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, 2006; three Pushcart Prizes; National Book Award for Fiction, 2018, for The Friend; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2020; 100 Best Books of the Twenty-First Century, New York Times, 2024, for The Friend; Windham-Campbell Prize, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, 2025.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies and to periodicals, including the Believer, Threepenny Review, Tin House, New Yorker, New York Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Author’s works have been translated into thirty languages.
In 2024, The Friend was adapted into a feature film directed by Scott McGhee and David Siegel. That same year, Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through was adapted as the feature film The Room Next Door, directed by Pedro Almodovar and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics and Warner Bros.
SIDELIGHTS
Sigrid Nunez is a novelist and creative writing teacher. A Feather on the Breath of God is Nunez’s well-received debut novel. With inspiration drawn from her own childhood, Nunez tells the story of a young woman born of Chang, a Chinese-Panamanian father, and Christa, a German-immigrant mother. The narrator’s parents met during World War II, when Chang was in Germany. Although the two can barely communicate and seem to have little affection for one another, they move to New York when Christa gets pregnant. The narrator is born in New York, where the family lives in severe poverty. As the narrator grows up, she consistently sees how her parents are unable to communicate. Her father dies when she is young, leaving her confused about his background and influence on her, and also leaving her in the care of her angry, overbearing mother. When she grows up, she becomes a teacher of English as a second language.
In this role, she meets Vadim, a Russian immigrant with whom she has a stormy relationship. Much as her parents did, she has difficulty communicating with Vadim, but as he learns more English their communication improves. Ultimately, the better she understands him, “the less she likes who he is and what he has to say,” observed Jane Gordon-Yarbrough in the Antioch Review. Nunez’s writing heads “straight for the heart of each personality she evokes,” observed Donna Seaman in Booklist.
Naked Sleeper is Nunez’s second novel, and it is “even more resonant than her first,” commented Booklist reviewer Seaman. The novel presents a “haunting portrait of a marriage viewed from the point of view of the wife,” observed People reviewer Louisa Ermelino. Nona is a woman whose childhood, dominated by a largely absentee father with whom she has totally lost contact after her parents’ separation, has left her emotionally troubled. She is married to Roy, an understanding man, but is tempted to infidelity by Lyle, a married professor and womanizer she meets at a writer’s retreat. Nona makes an impulsive decision to accompany Lyle, but she slowly discovers his rakish ways and realizes her mistake, leaving Roy and herself to face the damage her decision cost them both.
“Nunez exhibits impeccable control of her narrative,” commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer, while Ginia Bellafante remarked in Time that Nunez tells Nona’s story “with some impressively elegant writing, which gives this book its true appeal.” A Publishers Weekly critic concluded: “This is a haunting story, resonant with hard-won wisdom.”
For Rouenna centers on a middle-aged female novelist who has just broken up with her boyfriend and lives a lonely life in the aftermath. She is contacted by one of her readers, Rouenna Zycinski, a retired army nurse and a nearly forgotten childhood friend of the narrator’s. Rouenna asks the narrator to meet with her, and she reluctantly agrees to do so. The cultured, literate narrator and the rough-hewn, practical Rouenna are dramatically different, yet a friendship forms between the two. Rouenna asks the narrator to chronicle her life in Vietnam, which she considers her greatest accomplishment. The narrator cannot grasp the effect that Rouenna’s Vietnam experiences had on her, but when the woman unexpectedly commits suicide the narrator becomes determined to tell her story in the way Rouenna wanted.
“Nunez’s outstanding quality as a stylist is her transparency,” commented a reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly. “There is a conspicuous lack of pretension about her writing, a refreshing earnestness.” The novel is a “sad, touching tale of friendship and a smart, subtle dialogue on just where a culture’s stories come from,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor stated. Library Journal reviewer Judith Kicinski called For Rouenna a “deeply moral look at memory and friendship.”
Reviewing Nunez’s 2006 novel, The Last of Her Kind, Library Journal critic Eleanor J. Bader commented: “Every so often you close a book, and the only word that comes to mind is ‘Wow.’” Set in the rebellious years of the late 1960s, the novel tells the story of unlikely friends Georgette George and Ann Drayton. While attending Barnard College, impoverished, working-class Georgette finds herself rooming with Ann, a daughter of wealthy parents who has rejected the materialism of her upbringing. The two drop out of college but remain friends, until a virulent disagreement seems to signal the end of their friendship. Georgette becomes a successful editor for a fashion magazine, and Ann’s whereabouts go unknown. Years later, Georgette recognizes Ann as the defendant in a notorious national murder case. When she meets Ann’s recently widowed father, Georgette has an affair with him, finding in the relationship a way to better understand Ann. Meanwhile, perpetual activist Ann works on prison reform from inside jail, and she reveals that she has not completely purged Georgette from her life.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor named Nunez’s work a “masterful construction of the troubled conscience of the era and its aftermath.” In Publishers Weekly, a contributor stated that the novel’s “rich, almost scholarly prose” propels a story with disparate parts that cohere to “capture the violent idealism of the times while illuminating a moving truth about human nature.” Bader called the novel “stunningly powerful,” while Booklist reviewer Kristine Huntley predicted that “this engrossing, beautiful novel will enthrall readers.”
In her first nonfiction effort, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, Nunez reflects on her friendship with famed feminist writer, literary critic, and intellectual Susan Sontag. Nunez was mentored by Sontag, who died in 2004. Nunez also dated Sontag’s son. Discussing the memoir on her home page, Nunez remarked: “If she were alive today I would not have written a memoir about her. In fact, I wouldn’t have written a memoir at all if I hadn’t been asked to write an essay for an anthology about mentors, which is how this book began.” In a way, the book began when Sontag and Nunez met; Nunez was twenty-five when she was hired by Sontag to help organize her letters. Through this job, Nunez met Sontag’s son, David Rieff. Sontag supported their relationship, and Nunez eventually moved in with both mother and son. The living situation was often tense, and Nunez notes that Sontag was insecure and incapable of being alone. However, she also writes of her mentor’s prodigious talent and of the intellectuals and artists who gathered in their New York City apartment.
According to Martin Rubin in the Washington Times, “we all know the damage that a former disciple or acolyte can do with a hatchet job on what was once his or her icon, but, as this memoir of Susan Sontag demonstrates, a fond, still appreciative retrospective portrait can be even more devastating. For the total absence of malice in this insider’s portrait of Sontag makes what it reveals infinitely more powerful than if all this had been delivered wrapped in outrage, bitterness and disillusion, a mere sorry tale of victimization.” James Camp, writing in the New York Observer, also found that Nunez’s portrayal of Sontag is unique. “Nunez is so careful of her subject that she has not divided her story into sections or chapters. … The unconventional result is that her prose is left to follow the eddying currents of the author’s memory.” He added: “In different hands, this could conceivably be the recipe for chaotic failure, but here the effect is economy, a brisk freedom to note what matters and nothing more. … The flitting from fragment to fragment has a whiff of desperation about it, as if the author were laboring under pressures she could not quite withstand, but this is only fitting. … As well as a memoir, Ms. Nunez’s book is an elegy for a great woman and the company she kept.”
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The Friend is a novel about a woman and a dog she initially does not want. The woman is a middle-aged professor whose mentor and best friend commits suicide, and she is forced to take care of her mentor’s Great Dane, an enormous dog named Apollo. Even as she grieves the loss of her friend, she realizes Apollo is also suffering, and she commits to doing her best to understand it and provide what it needs. As the woman becomes more isolated with the dog, she processes her own struggles through various works of art: novels, movies, poetry.
Although Nunez’s earlier work received plenty of acclaim, the critical response to The Friend was ecstatic. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018, and in 2024 the New York Times named it one of the hundred best books of the century so far. A writer in Kirkus Reviews described it as a “singular book” that is “breathtaking both in pain and in beauty.” Other adjectives included “rigorous,” “stark,” and “elegant.” Diane Scharper, in America, wrote that “numerous religious references add resonance and irony to the novel,” and Scharper pointed out, as other critics did, how the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke functions as a touchstone for the narrator. The result for Scharper is a “complex and compelling novel.”
In Artforum, Vivian Gornick talked of how she felt when she came to the end of the novel: “I found myself sorry to be leaving the company of a feeling intelligence that had delighted me.” Gornick noted that the novel also functions as an “ongoing rumination on the writing life,” and she predicted that the novel would “connect swiftly” with many readers. In the New York Times Book Review, Lori Soderlind wrote, “The novel moves artfully through the narrator’s memories and her present sorrow.” Soderlind agreed with Gornick, describing the center of the novel as a “the contemplation of writing and the loss of integrity in our literary life.” Soderlind praised Nunez for how she “addresses important ideas unpretentiously and offers wisdom for any aspiring writer.”
Suicide also functions as an important plot point in What Are You Going Through. In this novel, the narrator is again a middle-aged writer, and an old friend who has terminal cancer approaches her to tell her that she wants to end her life. The friend asks the narrator to accompany her on a trip, and the novel relates the conversations they have on the way. The novel also features conversations the narrator has with other friends and acquaintances who only want someone to listen, and Nunez explores how human connections and relationships have changed in contemporary times.
Writing in Booklist, Annie Bostrom praised Nunez for how she writes with “compassion and joy” even when the narrative focuses on suffering and old age. A contributor in Kirkus Reviews called the book “spare and elegant and immediate” as well as “dryly funny and deeply tender.” They listed the book’s primary themes as “the meaning of life, the nature of death, writing, the purpose of friendship.” The result is “draining,” they admitted, but “worth it.” In a long review in the New Yorker, Merve Emre reflected on how most novels focus on youth and middle age, and that even novels about the elderly “look back more intently than they look down at the flesh and blood of seventy or eighty.” Emre noted that What Are You Going Through endeavors to be the exception. Emre acknowledged Nunez’s “knowing humor and dispassionate tone,” but then wrote that the novel’s narrator “embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life, from one another, and from themselves.”
Janice Y.K. Lee, writing in the New York Times Book Review, compared the novel to “having a long conversation with someone who is telling you something very important, but is telling it in a very quiet voice.” Lee urged readers to “really pay attention” and assured them that “the experience will be worth it,” for the result will be that “you will emerge calmer, meditative, more thoughtful.” In the Brooklyn Rail, John Kazanjian had a similar reaction: “[Nunez] illustrates the beautiful ways that we make do, and spend lifetimes in bittersweet pursuits of personal connections that might heal our emotional and existential wounds.” Kazanjian, however, saw the novel as “something completely new and even daring” by how it is a “probe into the heart of human empathy and individuality.”
Nunez began writing The Vulnerables at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. As she said in an interview with BOMB, “It wasn’t so much I wanted to write about the pandemic as I wanted to write about the present moment.” That meant, however, that she had to write a novel set in the pandemic. A female narrator, a writer as in many of Nunez’s earlier works, is living in an acquaintance’s apartment at the beginning of the pandemic, an apartment that has a miniature macaw (or a parrot, as many critics have noted) which is she taking care of. Then the former bird-sitter, a much younger man returns, and the unusual trio have to live together.
“Sharp and surprisingly tender” is how a writer in Kirkus Reviews described this novel from Nunez. They wrote that “despite the grimness of the setting, the novel is strangely, sweetly hopeful.” In the Brooklyn Rail, Yvonne C. Garrett wrote, “With her usual grace and skill, Sigrid Nunez presents a series of delicate, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, sometimes funny musings on life.” Garrett called the book a “moving contemplation of lockdown, extinction, the nature of human friendship, and one writer’s profound engagement with writing and the nature of hope.”
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Nunez, Sigrid, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, Atlas and Co. (New York, NY), 2011.
PERIODICALS
America, April 22, 2019, Diane Scharper, “Fiction about Nonfiction,” review of The Friend, pp. 46+.
Antioch Review, winter, 1996, Jane Gordon-Yarbrough, review of A Feather on the Breath of God, p. 107.
Artforum, February, 2018, Vivian Gornick, “Dog Be With You: Sigrid Nunez’s Novel of a Writer and Her Pet,” review of The Friend, p. S23.
Atlantic Monthly, December, 2001, review of For Rouenna, p. 145.
Booklist, December 15, 1994, Donna Seaman, review of A Feather on the Breath of God, p. 738; September 1, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of Naked Sleeper, p. 63; May 15, 1998, Frank Caso, review of Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, p. 1597; October 15, 2001, Marlene Chamberlain, review of For Rouenna, p. 383; January 1, 2006, Kristine Huntley, review of The Last of Her Kind, p. 55; August 1, 2020, Annie Bostrom, review of What Are You Going Through, pp. 25+.
Brooklyn Rail, February, 2021, John Kazanjian, review of What Are You Going Through, pp. 100+; November, 2023, Yvonne C. Garrett, review of The Vulnerables, p. 117.
Entertainment Weekly, May 22, 1998, Daneet Steffens, review of Mitz, p. 66; December 23, 2005, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of The Last of Her Kind, p. 83.
Houston Chronicle, February 20, 2006, Joyce Johnson, “Rich Girl, Poor Girl,” review of The Last of Her Kind.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2001, review of For Rouenna, p. 1319; November 1, 2005, review of The Last of Her Kind, p. 1162; October 15, 2017, review of The Friend; July 1, 2020, review of What Are You Going Through; September 1, 2023, review of The Vulnerables.
Library Journal, April 15, 1998, Yvette Weller Olson, review of Mitz, p. 114; October 15, 2001, Judith Kicinski, review of For Rouenna, p. 109; March 1, 2006, Eleanor J. Bader, review of The Last of Her Kind, p. 79.
Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2023, Lynn Steger Strong, “Sigrid Nunez’s Flawless Recipe for Literary Excellence: Throw in a Parrot.”
New York Observer, March 22, 2011, James Camp, review of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
New York Review of Books, May 11, 2006, Claire Messud, review of The Last of Her Kind; July 14, 2011, Cathleen Schine, review of Sempre Susan.
New York Times Book Review, March 11, 2018, Lori Soderlind, “For the Love of a Dog,” review of The Friend, p. 8(L); October 11, 2020, Janice Y.K. Lee, “Life and Death Collide,” review of What Are You Going Through, p. 8(L).
New Yorker, September 14, 2020, Merve Emre, “Aging Gracefully,” review of What Are You Going Through, p. 71.
O, the Oprah Magazine, January, 2006, “Risky Business: Four Truth-Telling Books about Loving, Grieving, and Daring to Embrace Your Dreams,” review of The Last of Her Kind, p. 90.
People, December 16, 1996, Louisa Ermelino, review of Naked Sleeper, p. 38.
Publishers Weekly, July 29, 1996, review of Naked Sleeper, p. 69; March 16, 1998, review of Mitz, p. 52; October 10, 2005, review of The Last of Her Kind, p. 33; November 20, 2017, Wendy Smith, “For Love of a Dog,” pp. 42+.
Spectator, January 20, 2024, Annie Walton Doyle, “Writing the Unthinkable,” review of The Vulnerables, pp. 40+.
Time, October 7, 1996, Ginia Bellafante, review of Naked Sleeper, p. 98.
TLS. Times Literary Supplement, January 26, 2024, Beejay Silcox, “The One about the Parrot. Crisis of Purpose in a Manhattan Flat during Lockdown,” review of The Vulnerables, p. 17.
Washington Times, April 29, 2011, Martin Rubin review of Sempre Susan.
ONLINE
Barnard Magazine, https://barnard.edu/ (Spring, 2024), Elizabeth Benedict, author interview.
BOMB, https://bombmagazine.org/ (November 2, 2023), Madeleine Connors, author interview.
Brick, https://brickmag.com/ (July 21, 2025), Eleanor Wachtel, author interview.
Creative Independent, https://thecreativeindependent.com/ (October 12, 2020), Maddie Crum, author interview.
Pioneer Works, https://pioneerworks.org/ (September 19, 2024), Jordan Kisner, author interview.
Public Books, https://www.publicbooks.org/ (May 7, 2024), Elisha Cohn, “It’s Not Only Human Stories Worth Telling.”
Sigrid Nunez website, http://www.sigridnunez.com (July 21, 2025).
Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it was longlisted for the 2019 Prix Femina and named a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Meilleure Livre. It was also a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2024, The New York Times listed The Friend among the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. A collection of Nunez’s short fiction will be published in 2026 under the title It Will Come Back to You.
The Friend has been adapted for film by directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee (2024). What Are You Going Through has been adapted for a film directed by Pedro Almodóvar, The Room Next Door (2024).
Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Windham Campbell Prize. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, and London Review of Books. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. Her story “The Plan” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her essay “Life and Story,” originally published in The Sewanee Review, was selected for The Best American Essays 2023. Her work has been published in more than thirty-five countries.
Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Boston University, Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She lives in New York City.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (June 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
Sigrid Nunez
Nunez at the 2019 National Book Festival
Nunez at the 2019 National Book Festival
Born 1951 (age 73–74)
New York City, U.S.
Occupation Writer
Nationality American
Education Barnard College (BA)
Columbia University (MFA)
Notable awards Whiting Award; Rome Prize; Berlin Prize; National Book Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Windham-Campbell Literature Prize
Sigrid Nunez (born 1951) is an American writer who is best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.[1] In 2025, Nunez was named as the recipient of a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in the fiction category.[2]
Biography
Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She received her BA from Barnard College (1972) and her MFA from Columbia University (1975), after which she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
Among the journals to which Nunez has contributed are The New Yorker, The New York Times,[3] The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, The Threepenny Review, the London Review of Books, Harper's Weekly,[4] and The Wall Street Journal.
Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. One of her short stories was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2019. Nunez, a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, is also the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. Nunez is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was a James Merrill Fellow in December 2018–January 2019.
She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Nunez has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and of several other writers' conferences across the country. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
She lives in New York City.[5]
In 2024, two of her novels were adapted into films.[6] The duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel adapted her novel The Friend into a film starring Naomi Watts.[7] Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar adapted What Are You Going Through into his English feature debut, The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.[8] The latter was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.[9]
Book synopses
In A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), "a young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, who meet in postwar Germany and settle in New York City. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet."[10] The New York Times described Nunez's debut as "A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent."[11]
Naked Sleeper (1996) is "a novel about the inescapable and sometimes unendurable complexities of love and the family drama,"[12] in which a woman falls into an extramarital affair and attempts to understand the father who abandoned her as a child.
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998) is a mock biography of a pet marmoset belonging to Leonard and Virginia Woolf. NPR described Mitz as "[a] wry, supremely intelligent literary gem about devotion."[13]
For Rouenna (2001). "Now in her fourth and perhaps best novel to date—about a writer haunted by her brief friendship with a former Vietnam combat nurse—Nunez revisits familiar Proustian territory with a frightening rigor."[14]
The Last of Her Kind (2006) follows the arc of a friendship between two women from different socioeconomic backgrounds who meet as roommates at Barnard College in 1968. Nunez has said that she wanted to write about the sixties by imagining the lives of "specific individuals who happened to come of age in that revolutionary time." Andrew O'Hehir called it "perhaps the finest [social novel] yet written about that peculiar generation of young Americans who believed their destiny was to shape history."[15]
In Salvation City (2010), a thirteen-year-old boy is orphaned in a global flu pandemic and sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife. "Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is about spiritual and moral growth, and the consolation of art."[16] Gary Shteyngart has said that the novel "makes one reconsider the ordering of our world."[17]
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (2011). In 1976, while recovering from surgery, Sontag hired Nunez to type her correspondence. Nunez began dating Sontag's son, David Rieff, and moved into the Upper West Side apartment that mother and son were sharing at the time. "This detailed, nuanced account of the more private side of a complex, contradictory public figure is told with even-handed good humor and more than a little compassion. Utterly absorbing." — Lydia Davis[18]
The Friend (2018). After her mentor and lifelong friend commits suicide, a writer inherits his Great Dane. The Friend is both a "contemplation of writing and the loss of integrity in our literary life" and, in the words of Cathleen Schine, "the most original canine love story since My Dog Tulip." It won the 2018 National Book Award[19] and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.[20] The Friend was a New York Times bestseller. It was short listed for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. In France, it was longlisted in the category of foreign fiction for the 2019 Prix Femina and selected as a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Meilleure Livre Étranger.[21]
What Are You Going Through (2020). A woman agrees to help a terminally ill friend by going away with her and seeing her through the last days of her life. The friend is planning to take a euthanasia drug rather than let cancer take its course. "It's as good as The Friend, if not better." — Dwight Garner[22]
The Vulnerables (2023). A writer, old enough to be considered a "vulnerable" in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, pet-sits a spirited parrot named Eureka in her friends' luxury apartment. When the original petsitter, a Gen Z college student, returns to the apartment, he and the narrator strike up an unlikely friendship. "Her Wordsworthian exploration of 'how much of life is shaped by sadness for what's left behind,' her rare ability to be at once wistfully elegiac and sharply hilarious make The Vulnerables a gift."[23]
Bibliography
Books
A Feather on the Breath of God. New York: HarperCollins. 1995. ISBN 9780312422738.
Naked Sleeper. New York: HarperCollins. 1996. ISBN 9780060172763.
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. New York: HarperFlamingo. 1998. ISBN 9780060174071.
For Rouenna. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2001. ISBN 9780374254308.
The Last of Her Kind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2006. ISBN 9780374183813.
Salvation City. New York: Riverhead Books. 2010. ISBN 9781594487668.
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. New York: Atlas Books. 2011. ISBN 9781594633348.
The Friend. New York: Riverhead Books. 2018. ISBN 9780735219441.[24]
What Are You Going Through. New York: Riverhead Books. 2020. ISBN 9780593191415.
The Vulnerables. New York: Riverhead Books. 2023. ISBN 9780593715512.[25]
Selected stories
"The Summer of the Hats", The Threepenny Review 34 (Summer 1988)
"Chang", The Threepenny Review 38 (Summer 1989) - excerpt from A Feather on the Breath of God
"Christa", The Iowa Review 21.1 (Winter 1991) - excerpt from A Feather on the Breath of God
"A Girl to Whirl", The Threepenny Review 47 (Autumn 1991)
"The Balloon", Salmagundi 93 (Winter 1992)
"Reading", The Threepenny Review 52 (Winter 1993)
"A Visit to the Great Man", The Threepenny Review 100 (Winter 2005)
"The Naked Juror", Daedalus 134.1 (Winter 2005)
"Airport Story", The Threepenny Review 127 (Fall 2011)
"Imagination", The Sun (April 2012)
"Philosophers",Conjunctions 58 (Spring 2012)
"Worried Sisters", Prairie Schooner 86.1 (Spring 2012) and Harper's (September 2012)
"The Blind", Paris Review 222 (Fall 2017) - excerpt from The Friend
"It Will Come Back to You", London Review of Books (November 2021)
"Greensleeves", The New Yorker (September 2024)
"The Rabbit's Foot", The Yale Review (Summer 2025)
Selected essays
"Suddenly Susan" (adaptation from Sempre Susan). The New York Times, February 25, 2011.
"Love and Fiction" (excerpt from Little Star #4). littlestarjournal.com, December 12, 2012.
"Shakespeare for Survivors" (review of Station Eleven, a novel, by Emily St. John Mandel). The New York Times Book Review, September 12, 2014.
"Two Memoirs Celebrate Muses With Four Legs" (review of two memoirs: Afterglow by Eileen Myles and Fetch by Nicole J. Georges). The New York Times Book Review, September 28, 2017.
"'Sight' and The Pleasures of Overthinking Motherhood" (review of Sight, a novel, by Jesse Greengrass). newyorker.com, August 22, 2018.
"Leonard Michaels Was a Cat Person" (introduction to A Cat, a novel, by Leonard Michaels). Paris Review Daily, November 14, 2018.
"Sex and Sincerity" (review of Cleanness, a novel, by Garth Greenwell). The New York Review of Books, June 11, 2020.
"Disorders of the Heart" (review of To Be a Man, a short story collection, by Nicole Krauss). The New York Review of Books, November 5, 2020.
"Lost, at Sea, at Odds" (review of Whereabouts, a novel, by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from the Italian by the author). The New York Review. May 27, 2021.
"'Desperate Characters' and the Chaos That Lies Beneath", The New York Times Style Magazine, July 13, 2022.
"Gored in the Afternoon" (review of Getting Lost, a novel, by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer). The New York Review. November 3, 2022.
Film adaptations
The Room Next Door (2024), based on the novel What Are You Going Through.
The Friend (2024), based on the homonymous novel.
‘The House of Fiction Has Many Rooms’
Elizabeth Benedict ’76 speaks with fellow writer and alum Sigrid Nunez ’72 about the bestselling author’s latest novel and what drives her to write
By Elizabeth Benedict ’76
Barnard Magazine
Spring 2024
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Sigrid Nunez
In 2018, Sigrid Nunez ’72 published her seventh novel, The Friend, catapulting her from esteemed literary writer to National Book Award winner and international bestseller — in her 60s.
She is currently promoting her latest, The Vulnerables (2023), as the movie version of The Friend, starring Naomi Watts and a dog named Bing, is in production. Along with What Are You Going Through (2020), the three novels are connected by the intimacy of the narrator’s voice and her crackling sensibility: a New York writer confronting external dilemmas — often involving an animal that needs care — while plumbing her rich inner life. The narrator ricochets from literary insights and anecdotes to finely wrought memories and trenchant observations about writing, love, and loss, wickedly funny one minute and heart-stopping the next.
In 2006, I reviewed her Barnard-inspired novel, The Last of Her Kind, for The New York Times, and we met soon after. Her contribution to my 2009 anthology, Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, inspired her 2011 memoir, Sempre Susan, about the celebrated writer and critic Susan Sontag.
Sigrid and I recently conducted an interview about writing, teaching, and a Barnard professor who influenced both of us.
Elizabeth Benedict: We both studied with Elizabeth Hardwick at Barnard. What were her most valuable lessons to you? What are your lessons to students?
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The Vulnerables cover
Sigrid Nunez: Hardwick’s most valuable lessons to me came not from taking class with her but from reading her work: the beautiful sentences, the incisive criticism, the virtuosic gift of observation. Since she believed that writing cannot be taught, she put disappointingly little effort into discussing our manuscripts, but I found her passion for literature and the life of the mind inspiring. I was also grateful to learn from her never to be satisfied with any writing that hasn’t gone through multiple drafts. As a teacher, I’ve tried to pass that same lesson on to my students as well as to convince them that they’ll learn far more from reading other writers than from any workshop and that they should read as much as possible.
I think what can be taught about writing is largely editorial. You try to show what works and what doesn’t work in a story, and why. You try to teach students the difference between a good sentence and a bad sentence. You want them to see that the way a person writes is as important as whatever they may write about. But you don’t tell them what they should write about; that has to come from them.
EB: I love The Vulnerables. Broadly, it’s about a writer who goes on long walks every day during the pandemic, attends a funeral, and takes care of a pet macaw. Like the narrators in the other recent novels, she reminds me of you. Yet even with all these similarities, it’s a novel. What makes it a novel?
SN: The Vulnerables is an invented prose narrative of book length that deals with imaginary characters and events. This fits the definition of a novel. It is true that the book contains some material that is not fictional, also that there are strong similarities between the narrator and the author. But this does not make the book either a memoir or a work of autofiction. Most of my writing falls outside traditional categories. But the house of fiction has many rooms, and there is more than one kind of novel.
EB: What compels you to write?
SN: Writing is something I’ve always wanted to do, something that, in spite of being often frustratingly difficult, comes naturally to me and gives me enormous pleasure. When I’m writing, I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, and I never feel estranged from myself, as I can sometimes feel when I’m engaged in some other activity. Also, there is a certain kind of thinking that happens only when you’re struggling to put things into words. The thinking that I have to do when writing helps me to understand many things — about myself, my life, my past, as well as about other people and life in general.
EB: What’s life like between books for you? Are you yearning for time to begin your next project?
SN: In the past, it usually hasn’t taken me long, once I’ve finished a book, to begin a new one. But this time it’s been different. That’s because, with The Vulnerables, I found myself writing the final volume of what has turned out to be a kind of trilogy — though I never planned for it to happen that way. What Are You Going Through came out of The Friend and The Vulnerables came out of What Are You Going Through. I’m not inspired to make it a tetralogy, though, and at the moment I have no idea what kind of book I want to write next.
EB: Your early ambition was to be a dancer, and you didn’t begin publishing books until you were 44. What wisdom or reassurance can you offer writers whose work isn’t yet being recognized or published?
SN: I could never honestly reassure a struggling writer that, if they just keep at it, publication or recognition will come. Because that simply is not true. I kept writing because I really wanted to, not because I believed it would all turn out well in the end. It could just as easily have not turned out well. Literary success is so unpredictable, dependent on so many forces outside the writer’s control. What keeps you writing has to be more than the hope of worldly reward. The practice itself has to do something for you, something important and valuable.
Elizabeth Benedict ’76 is the author of five novels and the recent memoir Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own. Her anthology, Me, My Hair, and I: Twenty-seven Women Untangle an Obsession, was selected for the Barnard Book Award for several years.
It’s Not Only Human Stories Worth Telling: Sigrid Nunez’s Animal Novels
5.7.2024
Literary Fiction
By Elisha Cohn
After several uncertain weeks this fall, my cat died. Her little life was bracketed by two crises that she was not aware of. I adopted her—a sleek, shy gray adolescent—at the beginning of the painfully lonely and economically disastrous year I first went on the academic job market. Her friendship endured several years of precarity, structured by institutional demands that seemed hostile to security and love. I moved her across the country three times. She liked to lie with her face buried in my knees while I worked. This combination—endless pages, small cat friend—felt just sustaining enough.
The decline of her life coincided with the pandemic. Whereas once my vulnerability created isolation, now isolation was supposed to insulate me from vulnerability. My cat resigned herself to the constant presence of my small children. She permitted their overly enthusiastic affection, hanging out by the oven to warm herself in the very heart of domestic disorder. She grew frail, and her medications tinged her sweet-smelling fur a strange color. But giving her care, unlike the thousand other frantic obligations of stay-at-home life, involved no sense of futility. Many times daily, I helped her as well as I could under the fraying circumstances while awaiting the government protections I was desperate for.
When she was nearing the end, I was haunted by an anecdote from Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend (2019), in which the narrator, about to have her aging cat euthanized, finds the cat suddenly alert, looking up at her as if to say, “I didn’t say I wanted you to kill me, I said I wanted you to make me feel better.” I was terrified that something similar would happen to us—that I would not know what help meant when she asked for it, would be wrong about what she needed when. My cat did ask for help, in the end, and I think I did understand. But I continue to turn to Nunez’s work to understand how I heard my friend and what the effort to respond to this small-scale crisis meant, especially in a time when suffering had seemed to reach its outer limits.
In Sigrid Nunez’s fiction, no creatures are more vulnerable than the animals her narrators love. In her recent, high-profile trilogy of sorts, each novel has its own central animal: a dog in The Friend (2019), a cat in What Are You Going Through (2020), and a parrot in The Vulnerables (2023). Though loving an animal can never redress the unsolvable problems her narrators face—pervasive sexual violence, the deaths of close human friends, the pandemic—pets are also never a sentimental distraction. Loving animals is nothing to be embarrassed about; their care is, as her most recent narrator puts it, “one of the few things that … didn’t have me asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
A novel set in the “uncertain spring” of April 2020, The Vulnerables seems to focus on a distinctively human dilemma: how to isolate without losing it, and how to inhabit the uncertainty of when and how the isolation will end. The title embraces the designation of people over the age of 65, including Nunez’s narrator, as “vulnerable.” But like in her previous novels, that category extends much further, especially because an animal is present: challenging, loving, needy, and perceptive.
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Empathy beyond Therapy
By Christina Fogarasi
Why are animals so central to Nunez’s thinking about the status of fiction? In some of her work, attending to another’s vulnerability transcends species and prompts storytelling. In What Are You Going Through, the narrator briefly encounters a talkative cat at an AirBnB while visiting a friend who, suffering from terminal cancer, is planning suicide. The novel dramatizes the difficult effort to understand someone else’s private experiences, and it opens with an epigraph from Simone Weil—“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’” The question implies the paramount importance of attention to others’ afflictions. Nunez uses a light touch in drawing on the work of this stringent French philosopher, but Weil’s impact is evident everywhere. Weil understands vulnerability and affliction to be the basis of our existence as creatures in the world, and the only useful response to be “complete attention.” This demands letting go of the self and becoming fully receptive to another, but “the capacity to give attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.”
In Nunez’s novel, such contemplative and self-effacing attunement is difficult for the narrator to achieve; even the effort is hard for her to tolerate. But one night, the cat jumps into her lap to tell his life story: “I had a decent home, the cat said, his words muffled by the purr but still clear.” Although the narrator has not asked him Weil’s question, the cat answers it, describing his exposure to human violence on the street and affirming the love of his adoptive human, his “second mother.” The narrator listens, reacting appreciatively: “He told many other stories that night—he was a real Scheherazade, that cat.” What Are You Going Through never questions why the cat can speak to the narrator or highlights the moment as an unexpected violation of the novel’s overall realism. In all his fictionality, the cat models one of Nunez’s core values: he speaks to ubiquitous vulnerability on a difficult night, and in doing so sustains the narrator’s intense attention, preparing her for future acts attuned to the needs of her dying friend.
Across nearly all of Nunez’s work, being a human is marked by sustained caretaking for some other creature, with significant consequences for the author’s understanding of the project of fiction writing itself. (See, for instance, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, her 1998 portrait of the careers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf through the lens of their unusual pet.) Many of her narrators present the way animals are treated as an index of ethical behavior, but more recently her attention to their vulnerability has become less reactive and more foundational. In For Rouenna (2001), a novel about a woman who served as a nurse in Vietnam, the antiwar narrator strives to tell a story about American culture’s abandonment of the war’s participants. Along the way, she notes deeply troubling connections between war, masculinity, and casual violence against animals. She hears a speaker at an antiwar rally tell the crowd, “If you want to know why things like My Lai happen, just go out there and pick ten men at random and ask them whether they have ever in their lives tortured or killed a helpless animal just for fun.” So she decides to experiment on men of her acquaintance. The results:
“It was just a turtle.”
“Do bullfrogs count?”
“Of course. I’m a hunter.”
“See, my brother caught this mouse …”
“Is it okay if I don’t answer?”
She notes quietly, “I quit before I reached ten.” Later, when she asks a former lover the same question, she is pleased to report that “his horror is genuine,” until, that is, “when we have turned to walk back to the house, he says, ‘Now, you said animal, right? Like, not including insects.’” The shift of topic that follows screams silent disgust.
The Friend, too, “balks at domination.” It is in this novel that animal love first becomes a central, sustaining relationship that offers an alternative to the structural problems that shape human interactions, political as well as sexual. The book opens with the narrator in endless mourning for a dead human friend, a writer who has committed suicide in part due to his sexual indiscretions. Tasked with caring for his dog, she very reluctantly agrees. The dog, a Great Dane, is burdensome, enormous, and grieving. But the novel carefully investigates their shared bereavement through short episodes that evoke the narrator’s refusal to exercise too much power. Her aversion to domination even extends to the narrative style. She has little interest in revealing much of herself beyond her growing love for her new pet, and his for her. The narrator composes miniature research essays, some about dogs, that are neither impersonal nor confessional; their tone is curious, understated, slightly evasive, but never cold. Rather than see arguments through to their conclusions, she leaves images and ideas hanging, dallying with facts inside a fiction, refusing a fuller line of mastery, evoking both curiosity about others and sadness at the many kinds of suffering, cruelty, and unkindness that concern her. She exhibits none of the intellectual satisfaction that would make her definitively superior to any of these conditions—nothing that would make her in any way superior to the dog she observes.
In The Vulnerables, the narrator also happens into a relationship with an animal. She becomes part of an unlikely pandemic pod in the luxurious flat of a friend of a friend, where she cares for a parrot, Eureka, “a highly intelligent and sociable breed that needed lots of attention.” When Eureka’s Gen-Z birdsitter leaves the gig unexpectedly, the narrator agrees to help, first visiting every day and later moving in when she offers her own apartment to an ER doctor. Already a bird lover, she finds solace in caring for Eureka, even if it’s marked as a trite comfort: “A cure for many ills, it’s been called. For the alleviation of stress and anxiety; for comfort in mourning, sadness, and loss: find someone who needs your help.”
It’s hard at first. The narrator, who admires birds, notes, “He screamed the first time he saw me. And given that a parrot screaming is a parrot in distress, this was hardly a promising introduction. … I was a stranger, after all, not one of his flock.” As time goes by, he relaxes, and she finds it “poignant” to see him having fun. She watches him watching her, finds evidence that he is happy, and worries that “he was happy that he’d succeeded in making me happy.” Her knowledge of Eureka’s state of mind is reverent but always speculative, somewhere between fact and fiction. A long chapter right in the middle of the book inspired by trying to understand him pushes the boundaries of “fiction” even further by offering an extended review of the documentary film My Octopus Teacher (2020), in which closely documenting the life of an octopus leads the filmmaker to what the narrator calls “rejuvenation” and even “salvation.” Her appreciation of the film allows her to assess cultural attitudes toward “affinity with other living beings” broadly but also avoid fully understanding her own affinity with this particular one.
Compared to the other animals in the trilogy, Eureka remains the least known. He’s certainly the least mammalian, perhaps not a coincidence. But even so, being with him in all his strangeness and attending to his needs prompts her to keep writing and keep waiting for whatever might emerge. As Weil notes, “There is a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.” If Nunez’s narrator does not quite have the right words yet for loving Eureka, she remains open, learning slowly how to see him.
Though loving an animal can never redress the unsolvable problems her narrators face—pervasive sexual violence, the deaths of close human friends, the pandemic—pets are also never a sentimental distraction.
All is well enough in social isolation. But the young man who departed abruptly returns. The narrator is unsettled, not only by the added COVID exposure but also by his easier intimacy with Eureka as he carries the bird on his shoulder through the apartment. Compared to The Friend, The Vulnerables suggests less potential for interspecies intimacy to offer personal transformation, despite the lessons of the octopus teacher. If anyone gets “salvation” out of caring for Eureka, it’s not the narrator but the housemate. The novel opens with some consideration of whether positive representations of masculinity are possible anymore, and following this theme, the housemate—she gives him the purposely unattractive nickname “Vetch”—struggles with his privilege and lack of independence, facing serious mental health challenges. But Vetch finds a new source of love in Eureka and takes the bird with him to a new living space, where he can let the parrot’s wings grow out and, perhaps, find a way out of masculine domination. The narrator, left behind, grieves: “That’s wonderful, I said, my heart breaking. And watched them go: out of my life, out of my novel.”
Denied the comfort Vetch receives, the narrator is left wondering whether novels should continue to be written when the object of attentiveness is no longer there to spur the process. What stories are there to tell that aren’t of knowledge gained, solace found? After this loss, the narrator seems to let herself go out of the novel too. The fiction that held space for affirmative attention to vulnerability doesn’t last, and the short section that follows feels more like a series of notes than a representation of a person’s lived experience of the pandemic.
The Vulnerables struggles with the category of fiction, while emphasizing more than ever the creaturely vulnerability of being a human (and the not that much loftier notion, “being human”). Toward the end, the narrator muses about the death of the novel: “While still a powerful means of portraying human character and human experience, somehow, more and more, fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point.” But it’s clearly not only human stories that are worth telling. The narrator never knows what her animal friend is really thinking, although she curates considerable research from studies of animal cognition and the cultural history of petkeeping to try to show it. There’s always something a little fictional about what it’s like to think you truly know an animal, but also something indisputably true about the creature’s presence and its needs. This starts to seem equally true of the human narrator, who remains in some ways the “stranger” she appeared in Eureka’s eyes—she is perhaps Nunez’s most reticent, least revealing protagonist. She turns away from herself and back toward the world even as she returns to isolation; in her vulnerability, she is not and never was alone. In Nunez’s work, wondering and careful attention to an animal’s life endures beyond questions of fact and fiction.
Caring for my cat did not transform me, though I miss her every day. Writing about her now, nonetheless, is a way of protecting of my ability to attend, a kind of vaccination. What this attention ultimately offers is not a protection from vulnerability but instead, a source of creative waiting and making that values uncertainty at times when we are most inclined to deny it. icon
Sigrid Nunez
The novelist on her love of animals, writing through a pandemic, and the frightening reality of our times.
November 2, 2023
Vulnerable1
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I finished Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend while eating dinner alone in a tiny Italian bar in London. I had the distinct sensation—often a symptom of travel—of being a stranger to the world. It was the kind of situation a Nunez protagonist might find themselves in: lonely, pensive, and unsettled, with only the company of a great book to amuse me.
In her new novel, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books), Sigrid Nunez revisits her preoccupations with loneliness and reflection. Set during the Covid lockdown, the novel follows an aging writer who reluctantly agrees to bird-sit a parrot named Eureka alongside a scattered Gen-Z college student. A surprising and tender relationship blossoms between them as the narrator examines climate change, writing, and the nature of being alive at such a turbulent moment. Nunez’s writing has the unique gift of being poignant, funny, and stunningly vulnerable. Weaving between probing meditations on Joan Didion and class inequality, it’s a delight to be inside the narrator’s head.
—Madeleine Connors
Madeleine Connors
As I read your novel, I was curious about how much of your own pandemic experience colored your writing. What made you want to set a novel during the pandemic?
Sigrid Nunez
It wasn’t so much I wanted to write about the pandemic as I wanted to write about the present moment. Recently, Michael Cunningham said he didn’t understand how you could write a novel now without writing about the pandemic. So, what happened was, it was the Spring of 2020, and like a lot of people, I was having trouble writing and concentrating. I was teaching at Boston University, and every spring, the school hosts a faculty reading. This time, it was on Zoom. Several people read, so they only want you to read a couple of pages, under ten minutes. So, I just started writing.
I did start with, “It was an uncertain spring.” Somehow, that came to my head, thinking about Virginia Woolf. And then, I was doing a lot of walking around, taking these long walks, and visiting the parks, and spring was coming into bloom. I wrote a little bit about that. Some of it made it into the book, and some didn’t. So, there were just a few pages. And then, I put that aside, and when I could write again, I used that as a starting point. Then the story unfolded.
MC
In The Friend, you have this Great Dane at the center of the novel. In your other novel, What Are You Going Through, there is a cat. This recent novel has a parrot. Is putting animals in the center of your novel something that’s become important to you in your process?
SN
That’s a good question. I do love animals, and I always have. I wish I had thought about writing about animals and including them as characters before. In 1998, I wrote a fun little book about how I knew that Virginia Woolf and her husband owned this pet monkey, Marmoset. And so, I wrote this book about Mitz and their other pets. Really, it was about Virginia Woolf and those years in the thirties, when they had Mitz. And I really enjoyed writing about that animal and the other animals in that book. But I still didn’t make any plans to write about animals.
Then I came to writing this book, and I thought I must have an animal, partly because it’s fun for me. But also, because I’ve discovered now that readers really like it. For one thing, as you start writing about an animal, you already have a kind of instant warmth. That’s our relationship with them. It’s an affectionate warmth, and you have the opportunity for some gentleness, tenderness, and humor, right? Animals are funny, we all know that. They do funny things. Now, I’ve done a monkey, a dog, a cat, and a parrot.
1600 Sigrid Nunez 2017 c Marion Ettlinger Higher res
MC
I’m certainly not the first person to say this about your work, but occasionally your novels feel like memoirs. The narrator is often a writer and teacher living in New York. Is that a conscious choice?
SN
I think of the books as hybrids. I want it both ways. I want to be free to write and invent things that never really happened that I think would be interesting for the reader. But I do like writing in the first person. It’s not every book I’ve written, but when the narrator is a woman of my age, living in New York, who teaches writing and literature, I go into her mind. It’s only natural that she and I would share the same sensibility. It’s going to sound like a memoir because it’s in the first person, it’s talking about something that happened in the past, and because the narrator and I share certain qualities. That’s not even a choice. That’s a necessity. That’s what’s going to happen if you write like that. It’s going to read to some extent like a memoir.
MC
I love that The Vulnerables incorporates many other writers’ voices. You include Virginia Woolf and have this great passage on Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Are these authors that you’re reading when you’re working on your own novel? Or work that inspired you at a different time?
SN
Mostly, when I bring up something I’ve read, it’s something I’ve read at some other time. It’s not something planned out. I’ll be writing something, and then it will occur to me. Just like the first sentence: Why did that come to me? I wasn’t thinking; “I want to begin with a sentence of Virginia Woolf.” Writing is thinking. When you’re writing, you’re thinking, imagining, and remembering. So, these are just things that occur to me, and I put them in when they seem enlightening and appropriate. Later, I tracked them down to make sure that I didn’t remember wrong or if I quoted somebody, to get an accurate quote, but it’s a very natural process, almost like talking—but a lot harder.
MC
How did you pace out a novel that is mostly in the narrator’s point of view?
SN
I don’t plan it. I’m not a writer who makes outlines. I just go by instinct. And of course, I do it better now than I did when I first started to write. I go linearly. I write something, and then I move on. I don’t do a lot of cutting and pasting or changing things around. Every time I sit down to write, I’m reading what I’ve already written. You sort of have an ear for something, you can sort of feel when it’s the pace that you want and when it’s not. It’s usually because something’s too slow, and then there’s an easy solution. You’ve babbled or something; you cut. You get there faster. “This is boring. They don’t need to know all that. Why are you telling them all this?” So, it’s about trying to do as good a job with everything as possible.
MC
In the novel, the narrator thinks about our current moment and the widespread cynicism in our culture. At one point, she notes that Joan Didion’s skepticism is almost a default in people she knows. Do you feel optimistic about the future?
SN
I share the same dread that so many people have, and it intensified during the pandemic; I was much more optimistic about the vaccine and the pandemic passing than I was about the political situation. There was an election cycle going on. At the same time, this incredible polarization. And then George Floyd was killed. The lockdown was calm compared to all that. It was extremely strange. We had the internet, and you could Zoom. I don’t mean to minimize that it was difficult: you had your family with you, which I realized could be horrible, too. But that murder and the agony that followed… and let’s not leave out climate dread.
You try to be optimistic, but I feel that just about everybody who’s not in denial feels that we have to do something, and we have to do it quickly. Also, I have a sense of helplessness as an ordinary person with no great power. I’m not a CEO in the fossil fuel industry. I feel a kind of helplessness that we all share. It’s hard to be optimistic when you think that you can’t do anything or do much to alter this course, which many people feel is a course heading towards something catastrophic. As I say in the book, it’s a little hard not catastrophize while the world is on fire. Every time we look at the paper—even today, already 10,000 people in Libya swept to their deaths because dams that weren’t taken care of by governments that should have taken care of them. These things keep happening. It’s quite frightening.
MC
Do you feel like the omniscient anxiety about the state of the world makes it hard to write or is it empowering?
SN
I think it makes it hard. I and many people I know have had a great deal of trouble writing, feeling like, What is the point? We’re living in a world of rolling crises and constant disasters, and for example, writing a novel about people having affairs with each other—it can feel very, very superficial. It’s always consoling to some extent to be doing work, to be engaged in some kind of work that is meaningful.
MC
Finally, I want to ask you a question that you pose in your novel. One of your characters asks, “What would you ask a dog if he could understand you?” What would be your answer?
SN
I actually would agree with my narrator. That question doesn’t really make sense because we don’t know a dog’s consciousness. We don’t know. We think we do, but what we do is anthropomorphize. So I could ask any question, but the answer would not be coming from the dog. I do love this true story that someone had told me where the teacher had asked the children, ‘What would you ask a dog?’ Then, one child said, ‘What will I be when I grow up?’ It’s so charming. What would you ask the dog?
MC
I think I would ask the dog if he’s happy. I’m so curious if, day-to-day, dogs experience happiness or grief.
SN
Yes, I suppose some version of that: How are you? I do wonder about all these things, whether they ever get nostalgic, how they grieve. But I can’t imagine getting that answer from a dog. It’s one of those experimental games that doesn’t give you any answer you want.
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The Vulnerables is available for purchase here.
Madeleine Connors is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, W Magazine and Bookforum.
Sigrid Nunez’s flawless recipe for literary excellence: Throw in a parrot
Sigrid Nunez, an author, poses in a black and white photo with short gray hair and an enigmatic smile.
Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel, “The Vulnerables,” tackles aging, literary precarity, the generation gap and the problem of a surprising macaw. (Marion Ettlinger)
By Lynn Steger Strong
Nov. 15, 2023 8 AM PT
On the Shelf
The Vulnerables
By Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead: 256 pages, $28
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Talking to Sigrid Nunez, much like reading Sigrid Nunez, is deeply pleasurable, immediately intimate. There is warmth but also urgency, and very little artifice. When I ask her a too-vague question about how time feels essential to her fiction, she answers simply, “Well, it just is. I would never be able to explain it.”
We met at the espresso bar of a hotel in Manhattan’s West Village not far from Nunez’s apartment. Both of us were early, and she had just quit the university-teaching grind, so we traded teaching travel stories. Nunez grew up in Brooklyn and on Staten Island, went to Barnard and then Columbia for her MFA, has taught at Princeton, Syracuse, Smith College and Boston University as well as Columbia, The New School, Hunter College and New York University — all without a driver’s license. But now, at 72, in the wake of a 2018 National Book Award for her novel “The Friend,” she is able to step back and settle into the writing life she’s always envisioned.
“The Vulnerables,” out this month, is Nunez’s ninth novel and the third in what she now sees as a trilogy. She didn’t set out to write them as a unit, but as she moved from “The Friend” to 2020’s “What Are You Going Through,” she recognized each had the same voice, same unnamed narrator, same relationship to moving in and out of story, into thought and anecdote.
Books
Famous at last for her previous novel, “The Friend,” Sigrid Nunez strikes again
Sept. 8, 2020
Each piece of the trilogy also involves an intimate, often very funny relationship to an animal. “As soon as you bring an animal in,” she says, “you’re giving yourself an opportunity to create some warmth and humor.”
Humor is a constant in these books. “Comedy is so much a part of life that I feel like when I read a novel and there’s no humor in it, I feel like something essential is being left out,” she says. This immediately summons for me an image from “The Friend” in which the protagonist uses a child’s pail and shovel to clean up after the Great Dane she has been tasked to care for.
"The Vulnerables," by Sigrid Nunez
In “The Vulnerables,” the animal, Eureka, is a parrot. Years ago, Nunez lived near a store on Bleecker Street filled with exotic birds. “It was an ear-bleeding sound,” she recalls. “I would try to bring people there and they’d say, ‘I can’t deal. I’ll wait for you outside.’ But you could walk around, and you could hold your hand out and they would come … there were macaws and cockatoos, they were just wonderful.”
The book didn’t start, however, with the parrot. It began, like the others, with the unnamed writer and teacher, now facing the COVID pandemic at over 65 (and hence “a vulnerable”). Every book was built, she says, by “pure instinct. I create everything linearly; when I write, whatever happens comes out of what was written before.” She pulls freely at life, filling her work with readings and ideas that she also has, but the spark is always invention.
“My early reading, what made me passionate about literature was fairy tales, which means magic stuff, which means trees talking and people turning into birds and so on,” she says. “This is what was exciting. And then when I was a little older, I loved Dickens.”
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In the case of “The Vulnerables,” the unnamed narrator is spurred out of the isolation of her small apartment and her daily life by an abandoned bird in the apartment of a friend of a friend. Walks and meditations shift to interaction, worry, caretaking; the jokes come more easily with the bird there.
Like the dog in “The Friend” and the cat in “What Are You Going Through,” the bird surprised Nunez before it surprised us. “I want the reader to be reading it the same way I’m writing it,” she says. “I wanted it to feel unplanned because it was unplanned. I mean, there’s a structure, as you know, but a lot of it is serendipitous.”
These inventions differentiate the books from what might otherwise be considered “autofiction” — a nearly meaningless term after years of overuse, but defined loosely as fiction threaded tightly into the consciousness of a writer, who often shares the author’s name, in which what happens feels plotless on purpose, closer to life (or a writer’s version of it) as it actually transpires.
Eureka’s arrival forces Nunez’s deeply internal narrator outside of herself. Weeks later, another surprise arrival, Eureka’s former caretaker — an impossibly fit and deeply troubled 20-something college dropout — forces her into spaces of uncertainty, discomfort: all deeply useful things for books.
“I see my work as hybrid fiction,” Nunez says. While she moves seamlessly from invention to what she terms, courtesy of Javier Marias, “literary thinking,” the constant is a deliberate and careful attention to language, a compulsion, Nunez says “to search.” Each word might spring the narrator into a new scene or tangent — or serve as a barb to hang her up for a page or paragraph.
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And what is she searching for? Once, Nunez tells me, a man asked her at a talk if she had “a message.” She laughed — and laughs again telling me this. Of course there is no message, she says. Only didactic empty fiction (I say) has a message. What Nunez is trying to do instead is find meaning, to understand. What makes her search particularly thrilling is its brashness and its erudition, its equal propensity to reach for Nietzsche, J.M. Coetzee or T.S. Eliot or just to play fetch with a bird.
What this feels like is an eventful, rich, addictive conversation with your smartest, funniest and most well-read friend. Except, Nunez says, the conversation takes on new dimensions and new textures when it’s written down. Something happens to her thinking, she says; it’s deepened by the time she spends searching through a book.
“Elizabeth Hardwick used to say only writers ever really think, as if there was no such thing as a scientist or something,” Nunez says, invoking her one-time teacher with a mix of adoration and seasoned skepticism. “What she meant, and what I have found, is that there are these things that are only going to occur to you while you’re writing. I wouldn’t be going for a walk and have all these thoughts. But when I’m actually writing, things occur to me.”
Near the end of “The Vulnerables,” Nunez’s narrator shifts her attention to the state of books: their worth, who reads them, the futility of hurling language at so many existential threats. Perhaps every generation thinks theirs is the scariest and hardest, but this is the one we’re inside of. It often feels terrifying. Near the end of the book, a doctor uses the word “deranged.”
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Novels can feel small by contrast — solipsistic, absurd. Nunez and I talked a long time about the state of contemporary fiction, its lack of humor, how pointless it can often seem to devote one’s life to it. (“But then we can’t stop, can we?” Nunez said.) In person as in her novels, Nunez seldom states something she doesn’t later complicate.
“I do think that there’s no real reason to think of your work having a large effect out there in the world,” she says. “First of all, there’s so much work out there. There’s so many novels, there’s so much writing, and it passes quickly.”
But then, a few minutes later, with as much clarity: “There is this beautiful quote where Czeslaw Milosz says: ‘Before you print a poem, you should reflect on whether this verse could be of use to at least one person in the struggle with himself and the world.’ And that I think is a lot to ask, and also enough to ask.”
Strong is a critic and the author, most recently, of the novel “Flight.”
Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna, and the National Book Award-winning The Friend, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Nunez lives in New York City.
On finding your subject
Novelist Sigrid Nunez on the use of autobiography, writing without an ending in mind, taking responsibility for your work, and why nothing you write is wasted.
TagsWriting, Process, Beginnings, Education, Mentorship, Identity
Part of:
Developing a creative process
Finding your voice
Author
From a conversation with Maddie Crum
DateOctober 12, 2020
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Your novel What Are You Going Through? begins with a lecture from an academic who speaks candidly and hopelessly about climate change and weapons of mass destruction. His audience’s reaction is really negative. “Hope matters,” they say. You aren’t primarily a lecturer or essayist, but a fiction writer. So, I’m curious: does hope matter to you in contemporary fiction?
Well, I value hope in any human sphere. I mean, hope is a very positive emotion. But I can’t say that if somebody writes a book, or a story, or a piece, or something in which… Well, fiction, we’re talking about fiction. If somebody writes fiction, and that author’s vision is a hopeless one, I can’t say the book is no good just because there’s no hope in it. If there is a work of fiction that is hopeful about any aspect of human experience, and communicates that hope to me, I would think that that was a very good thing. But it doesn’t mean that if it isn’t there, that I feel the book has in some way failed.
The most important thing for me is that it doesn’t really matter how sad, or hopeless, or depressing a story is. A beautifully told story, no matter how sad, always lifts you up, like Faulkner said. So I feel that a work, whether it’s fiction or a work of art in general, no matter how tragic or how grim the subject matter, if it’s a fine piece of work, if it’s a beautiful work, if it’s a well-done work, it lifts you up. That’s what I believe.
Throughout the novel, the narrator acts as a caregiver and a listener. Even though she has desires and makes decisions, I feel that we come to see her almost in relief.
Now, what do you mean by “in relief”?
We get to know her through the people she knows.
Yeah.
And through the struggles of the people around her, as opposed to her… well, I guess, in addition to her own struggles.
I know what you mean. I think there’s something about this narrator, who keeps herself in the shadows to some extent and is really writing about other people that she encounters. Some of them are complete strangers, and some of them are these women that she was once very close to and is once again becoming very close to.
But I would say that the narrator becomes a character that you know because she’s defined by the way she sees the world. She’s observing other people in certain circumstances in the world around her, and it’s a first-person narrative. So, we get her sensibility, her point of view, how she sees things, and that’s how we know her.
Although it’s a really different book, I’m reminded of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. In interviews, Cusk talks about the death of character, or the old ways of viewing characters as these heroes who go on journeys. What are your thoughts on that?
Well, her name has come up a lot. Not just in talking about this book, but in talking about The Friend as well, my last book. And I am an admirer of Rachel Cusk’s, and I have read the trilogy. I think one of the main things that she says that’s been quoted a lot is her idea that autobiography is the only subject anymore for fiction.
And it’s a little tricky because my work, the book that we’re talking about, it reads like some kind of hybrid, maybe a memoir, or it reads like autofiction, you could say. And her work is often called autofiction, though I don’t really have any way to know how much of it is auto, and how much of it is fiction.
But in my case, I too have found that certain traditional elements, or that certain elements of traditional fiction—plot, and character development, and a certain kind of narrative structure—just aren’t adequate for what I want to do as a fiction writer. But it’s not autofiction. I mean, the narrator is a first-person narrator who has certain things in common with me. But none of this happened. It’s all invented. The encounters with various people, maybe there are some details from life, but I made everything up.
I took your class at Brooklyn College, which was centered on autobiographical fiction. Your criteria for that genre was that the writers themselves had to claim the work was autobiographical. When did you first become interested in that genre of fiction?
Well, my first novel came out in 1995, and it was written over a five-year period. It could have been a story, it could have been an essay, it was completely non-fictional. That is my father, that is my mother. That’s a real autobiographical novel, like so many other first novels. 99% of it could have honestly been published as nonfiction. So I must have had a really serious interest in that kind of writing from the beginning.
When I was an undergraduate, I studied with Elizabeth Hardwick, and she was a kind of… I mean, she was a mentor, but she was also a kind of idol, and she had written this book called Sleepless Nights. And that’s completely autofictional. And I think I somehow haven’t always realized what a profound influence that book has had on me, and on my first book. And that book of hers, Sleepless Nights, was vastly influenced by Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which also had a profound influence. And that is a completely essayistic, autobiographical novel, right? And another writer whose work I greatly admire, Renata Adler, who wrote even before Elizabeth Hardwick published Sleepless Nights, kind of right before, she published this book called Speedboat. I remember Elizabeth Hardwick saying that that book really helped her figure out how to do what she wanted to do.
You’ve mentioned that first novels are often closer to writer’s lives. Why do you think that might be?
Well, it was 100 percent true for me, and as a matter of fact, I had made quite a few false starts, as I recall, before I wrote that book. And I have always thought that the reason why those false starts happened is because I was one of the many, many, many, many, many writers who needed to get certain life experiences on the page, certain autobiographical material on the page, before moving on to other kinds of fiction. I think it’s just some kind of housekeeping that has to be done before you can even let yourself into another level of imagination. You want to try to understand who you are. I mean, when you write that first book, when you write an autobiographical work like that, I think what you’re trying to do is figure out something about your identity. Where you came from, who you are, maybe why you’re writing.
There are plenty of books out there. It’s not like the autobiographical ones are better or worse. But that’s why I wanted to teach that course, because I felt, I’m teaching all these emerging writers, most of them pretty young, most of them unpublished, and a lot of them, what they’re going to be working on is something that’s autobiographical, and that can be extremely difficult. So, I want to show how many different ways people could do it, and some ways we agreed were better than other ways. We didn’t think that all the books were equally successful.
There was a lot of division. Nobody liked Eileen Myles’s novel Chelsea Girls, which I think about all the time.
Right. And then Eileen did write a memoir about [their] dog.
Right, right. I read that. I loved that.
I loved it. I absolutely adored it. Yeah.
I love nonfiction by poets in general.
Agreed.
So, I want to discuss the responsibilities that writers have or don’t have to the real people in their lives. What in your view are some ethical or artistic guidelines for writing about real people?
I think the most important thing to remember is that it’s not enough to say, “I’m in the right, because this is me, I’m a writer, and I want to tell this story, and I need to tell this story.” You really have to take responsibility for what you’re doing. I mean do it if that’s what you want to do, but don’t poo poo or dismiss the fact that this could be hurtful to some other person. And then you have to weigh that. You have to figure out what you’re doing and why, and you have to face up to that responsibility. And I think that you have to acknowledge that people don’t want people to write about them, generally.
And if you write a certain kind of book, one that clearly has the agenda of telling the world how much you suffered at the hands of other people, and everybody was mean to you, and they were so bad to you, and your father was awful, and your mother was awful, it’s just no matter how good a writer you are, if it comes across as a desire to get back at these people who hurt you, as a work of literature, it’s going to be unpleasant. I don’t want to read it. I don’t trust it.
Toni Morrison had a very strong feeling about this. She said a person has a copyright on their own life, and it shouldn’t be available to other people for fiction. She didn’t do it, she would never do it.
It must be hard to suss out when you’re drawing on other people’s lives and when you aren’t, though.
I know what you mean. Right. But I think she was really talking about all these writers who write very transparently. And so, I mean, I completely respect what she’s saying, but I didn’t obey what she was saying. So, I see both sides of it, but I take what she said very seriously, and I think whoever’s doing this, and involved in this, in writing about other people, should take some time and sit there with what she said.
The only other thing that I’ll say about that, is that I think you also have to trust your conscience, because unless you’re a psychopath, you know almost physically when you are doing something wrong. I mean, your stomach churns. When you lie, in certain situations you almost wet your pants, your cheeks turn very red, your hands might shake when you lie, if you cheat. You have a physical response. And so, I feel like, you know when you’re doing something evil. And if you’re getting that feeling, not just anxiety about what your mother’s going to think when she reads this, right? But this other feeling, I think that’s what you have to trust. You have to trust that you know when you’re doing something really wrong, as opposed to doing something that might have repercussions that aren’t wonderful, and that you’re going to have to deal with. And that is how I felt. I knew there would be repercussions. I knew there would be problems with my family. But I did feel that I had to do what I did, and I also have not regretted it. That’s important, too. That you not end up regretting it.
What is something else you wish someone told you when you began writing?
That nothing is wasted. If you write these 40 pages, and none of them are working, and they all go in the garbage, right? They feel wasted. They weren’t wasted.
Sometimes you have to write many pages that are not going to end up in the book. They’re going to end up elsewhere, deleted, thrown out, whatever. But you would not have reached where you were going if you hadn’t gone through all that process. When you’re writing, nothing is wasted. No matter how many drafts aren’t working, or how much material you end up not using. It’s all part of the process, and you have to go through that to get to something that does work.
How do you start a project?
Well, it’s very simple for me. It’s pretty much always the same. I might have certain things swimming around in my head. We all always do. What’s been on your mind lately? You could ask anybody that, and you’d get a couple of answers. But, I always jump in. I always just try to think of a first sentence. Well, actually, I decide firstly if it’s going to be in third person or first person. And then I just think of something, I just get something moving.
In this case, I was at the Djerassi Foundation in California as a resident, and I hadn’t started a new book yet, and it had been a whole year since I finished The Friend. And it just came to me to say, “I went to hear a man give a talk.” That just entered my head. And then I just thought, “Well, what man? Who is ‘I’? What talk? Where is she?” And then I just went with it, and it’s pretty much always been that way.
With The Friend, I had on my mind this idea of Cambodian women and their psychosomatic weeping, that I had been thinking about that for a while. I had been thinking about suicide among my friends, suicidal thoughts among my friends, and I just started with that. And so, I just really… I don’t try to think it out beforehand, or make a lot of plans, or do a plan or anything like that. I just try to think of something, anything that sounds promising. And then I just try to stick to it, as opposed to having 10 options.
So you find the beginnings of your novels tend to stay intact through revision?
Yeah, totally. I mean, that’s why I stick with this plan, because it’s almost like I set that task for myself. I don’t allow myself to deviate from it. I think, “Well, there must be a reason I came up with this sentence and not any other sentence.”
Even with something as simple as my book about Virginia Woolf, and her husband, and their pet monkey, Mitz, which is largely nonfiction, because I use the Woolf husband and wife, their journals, and letters, and biographies, and all this stuff to construct this story. It just came to me, to say, “It was a Thursday in July.” Which is not a great way to start any book. I mean, anybody would tell you, “don’t start with what day it was.” But in this particular book, I wanted to start with a certain scene that actually took place that I took from her diary. And I kind of liked the way that it sounded almost Woolfian to me. “It was a Thursday in July.” Right?
And as you know from writing, the more you write, the more you put down, the narrower your opportunities become, because you put it down, you committed to something. I mean, you’ve introduced a character, now you can’t get rid of the character. Who is this man giving this talk? And what would he be talking about?
In Heidi Julavits’ book, The Folded Clock, she uses this metaphor of driving up an icy path—she and her friend actually did this—and it keeps getting narrower, and they can’t go back because it’s icy. And so, it’s this sort of, I don’t know, irreversible trip ahead.
Yeah. Yeah, and I think that’s a good thing. A really long time ago, there were so many things you could not write about in fiction. You could not write about sex, for example. There were all kinds of things you couldn’t write about, because there were these rules, and there were these laws. But now, of course, you can write about absolutely anything. Anything, anything at all, and it’s a little overwhelming. And so to pull things in and narrow things down is actually helpful.
Right. And how do you know when a project is done?
I think that’s the part of writing that I think is the most intuitive and unpredictable. What happens to me is that I—unlike other writers that I’ve known, particularly mystery writers—I don’t have an ending in mind. And it might happen when I get to a certain point that I think, “Oh, I know how this is going to end probably.” And then I write a little more, and I think, “Well, that won’t work.”
So, what always happens is that as I approach the ending, I can sense myself coming to an ending. And then because I’ve been working for such a long time on the book, and it’s all in my head, and many things have happened supposedly, the thing just starts to draw tight. The threads start to come together. “Well, I’ve left this loose, and that loose, and that loose. So how can these be pulled together? And what can I say that would make a satisfying close?”
It doesn’t have to be a resolution to all the problems I bring up, and it doesn’t have to be a surprise ending, or a slam-bang ending, but I find that at a certain point when I’m writing something natural starts to happen. And even if it takes a lot for me to write the ending, and sometimes it does, it still feels natural. I can feel myself moving toward ending in a successful way.
One of my big anxieties is I’m going to get somewhere, and then think, “Well, how do I end it?” But I think that’s false. I mean, I think it has to end. It has to end somewhere.
Sigrid Nunez Is
Always Lying
Jordan Kisner talks with the author about animals, Virginia Woolf, and how she found her voice.
A black-and-white photographic portrait of Sigrid Nunez, leaning her head against her right hand and staring into the camera.
Sigrid Nunez, 2017.Photo: Marion Ettlinger
BY Jordan Kisner
Jordan Kisner is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine. She is the host of Thresholds, and an alum of PW’s narrative arts residency.
09.19.24
Sigrid Nunez, per a recent profile in the New York Times Magazine, is a “master of noticing.” Her novels—most recently What Are You Going Through and The Friend, both adapted for the screen and set to release this year—contain all the quotidian texture of real life, even its boredom. At the same time, her vision elevates or even enchants that reality with subtle strangeness, humor, and formal elegance. When we sat down to talk for my podcast, Thresholds, our conversation focused initially on the first book she published, A Feather on the Breath of God. That acclaimed novel, which came out in 2005, felt like a real breakthrough for her. Nunez was in her forties at the time, and had been writing for many years, but in a style that wasn’t working because it was too close to the writerly voice of one of her heroes: Virginia Woolf. We talked about that maybe too-influential relationship to Woolf, and the way Nunez broke out of it by writing a novel that grew from real life: from an attempt to write about her own Chinese-Panamanian father and German mother.
I wanted to know how she developed her touch for elevating the quotidian, and how she built the distinctive narrative voice that presides over her books—a voice that’s a lot like Sigrid’s, but isn’t quite her. There’s a touch of mischief in this proximity to the real. “Well, I want to have it both ways, right?” she says. “I want the reader to know that my novels are works of imagination. On the other hand, I want to lie so well that they think everything really did happen just as I say it did.”
Jordan Kisner
In the first lines of your most recent book, The Vulnerables, which came out last year, you write:
“It was an uncertain spring.”
I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I’d looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t. Always instead the emphasis is on what you remembered.
I wanted to start by reading that because I love the sound of your voice in it, which is blunt and thoughtful and maybe a little contrarian. And because the ideas touch on some of the ideas that are really present in your work, and in our conversation today—the distinction between what happens and how you feel about it, the role of fiction in framing and memorializing human experience. I want to know about how you built the distinctive narrative voice that presides over your last few books, a voice that’s a lot like you, but isn’t quite.
Sigrid Nunez
My first book, A Feather on The Breath of God, is as close to autofiction as anything I’ve written. And I started that book by writing about my father. The first sentence came to me as a memory: “The first time I ever heard my father speak Chinese was at Coney Island.” It was absolutely true, and it was interesting. And so I started writing the part of the book I would end up calling “Chang,” and as I kept writing I found myself never wanting or needing to invent anything.
At that point, I didn’t know whether I had a memoir or an essay, and I didn’t really care. But now I had this piece, “Chang,” and that led me to write what would become the novel’s next part, “Christa,” about my mother and how she met my father, and about their marriage and their lives as immigrants in America.
Then I thought, these two parts go together, they could make a novel. (In fact they turned out to be only the first half of Feather by the time it was published.) But again, it started with that one factual sentence, about my father. Although I do always incorporate some autobiographical elements into my work, most of it is not autofiction, and Feather contains a lot of fictional material.
JK
This may be intuitive, but it sounds like you’re simply putting one foot in front of the other as you make the thing.
SN
Well, I do think it’s intuitive, and I have used that very phrase, putting one foot in front of the other, to describe my process. That really is how I’ve written all of my books. I start with something, and then I just creep along from there, and I write linearly. I write a couple pages, and then I think: What could happen next? What should happen? By the time I finish the manuscript, except for small changes, it’s done, because I’ve been revising constantly all along. It’s very important for me not to go off on the wrong path for too long, because it would be very hard for me to be far into a book and then have to go back and undo everything. I really need to feel that I’m fixing whatever problems might arise while I’m in the process of writing.
JK
Is that how you had been writing before you started working on Feather on the Breath of God? How do you sense what is enough to go on?
SN
Most writers I know only attempt to write a story if they have the story in their head, but I never do that with a novel. In a longer work, I think there’s always enough to go on because of the need to develop the characters. Who is this person? What kind of personality do they have? What do they do for a living? Why are they having dinner with that other character? You have to answer those questions. And unless you’re writing a complete transcription of your own autobiographical experience, you have to start making things up.
I mean, that’s the job: creating characters that are believable and engaging, and creating a believable world for them to be in, and giving them experiences people will want to read about. Start with a character and you can go anywhere.
I want the reader to know that my novels are works of imagination. On the other hand, I want to lie so well that they think everything really did happen just as I say it did.
JK
Yeah. You start with a very simple sentence and then trust that you can, through a process of decision making, kind of unspool it into something lifelike. I’m curious how you locate or build in that kind of lifelike quality that you’re describing. Your process sounds incredibly simple, but these don’t feel like simple books, nor do they read as the result of a totally straightforward decision-making process.
SN
I think that part of it is about the language itself. Whatever you’re writing, it’s always made up out of words and sentences and however you structure the text.
When I was teaching, very often it happened that, when the class would agree about liking a particular part of someone’s manuscript, the writer would say: “Really? That’s interesting, because that was the easiest part for me—that came the easiest.” And then I would tell them about a piece of advice I remembered hearing from Mark Strand: When something comes easy to you, pay attention to it, because that’s your gift.
I know that my writing is working for me when I’m writing fairly fluently, even if it’s also hard. Some part of it feels easy in the sense that it’s moving—there’s the feeling of I want to stay here, this feels real. And I have enough experience as a writer now to know when I’m in the place I need to be.
JK
Did you have to learn how to find and trust that sense when you’re in the right place? You used the word experience. I’m curious how that was cultivated.
SN
It really is largely about experience in the sense of practice. The more you write, the more practice you get, the more experienced you are, and—hopefully—the more confidence you have in what you’re doing.
I’m one of those people who at some point in their early writing life had a writer that they loved too much. In my case, it was Virginia Woolf. I read her for the first time in college and she immediately became an obsession—so much so that, for a long time, everything I wrote was bad Virginia Woolf. And of course it wasn’t any good. But I know that being steeped so deeply in the work of a literary genius must also have done me an enormous amount of good. It might have delayed my finding my own voice, but I don’t regret it at all.
There’s certainly nothing Woolfian about A Feather in the Breath of God. I didn’t consciously say, okay, now I’m going to write in a different style. I didn’t know what the form was going to be, I didn’t even know whether it was going to be fiction or nonfiction. But the fact that it was in the first person and that it began with a true story about my father meant that I was after a certain authenticity, which demanded a voice and a style that was completely different from Woolf’s.
JK
Tell me more about this narrator who is not you, but is some kind of deep expression of your voice, that spans so many of your works at this point?
SN
In several of my books I’ve used a hybrid form, part fiction, part nonfiction. Feather has this form, and that’s why I had so much trouble getting it published: people didn’t seem to know what to make of it. I’ve often used a first person narrator who happens to be a woman around my age, who lives alone in New York, who is also a writer, who reads a lot and who teaches writing and literature. So clearly, even if it’s not auto fiction or strictly autobiographical, there is that identification between author and narrator. Plus, the narrator is unnamed, which makes a reader even more likely to think that she is in fact Sigrid.
And it’s true that in those parts of a novel where the narrator is reflecting on something, be it some book she’s read or a movie she’s seen or something she’s observed about human nature—whatever—those are in fact my own reflections. But there’s also a fictional narrative about experiences that I myself have never had. Sometimes, switching to nonfiction, I’ll take a moment to reflect on the fictional story I’m telling. For the most part, though, there’s far more fiction than nonfiction in my novels. We all went through the pandemic, including me, but nobody asked me to take care of their parrot, as happens to the narrator of The Vulnerables. I just made all that up.
When there’s a lack of any humor in a novel, it feels as though something essential has been left out.
JK
Is there a pleasure in leaving people to wonder which of these things have happened to you and which of these things have not?
SN
Well, I want to have it both ways, right? I want the reader to know that what they’re reading is fiction and not memoir. I want them to know that my novels are works of imagination. On the other hand, I want to lie so well that they think everything really did happen just as I say it did, and I do any number of things to make this seem to be the case.
JK
I also want to ask you about animals. You have these books, these two major recent works, and one turns around a dog and the other turns around a parrot. And I’m curious, is there something in particular about thrusting a pet into a story that you like?
SN
Oh, definitely. I think people really do respond to animals in literature, but most writers don’t want to include them as characters because they’re afraid. They’re afraid they’ll look silly or sentimental or whatever. But why? Introduce an animal into a story, and you’ve got an opportunity for two things. One is warmth, because so many of us share tender feelings toward animals. And the other is humor, because people often see animal behavior—of pets in particular—as comical. And if you’re writing about heavy topics such as suicide and grief and the ordeal of the pandemic, as I’ve done, it certainly helps to have some opportunities for lightness, and writing about animals can give you that.
JK
That’s such an important point. In life and in fiction, animals are a shortcut to a slightly warmer, more grounded, and certainly sometimes more absurd way of thinking.
SN
Comedy is such an important part of human life and experience that, when there’s a lack of any humor in a novel, it feels as though something essential has been left out. ♦
An Interview with Sigrid Nunez
byEleanor Wachtel
From Brick 108
A version of this conversation was broadcast on Writers & Company on CBC Radio One in 2021, produced by Sandra Rabinovitch.
I remember when Sigrid Nunez’s eighth title, The Friend, came out and three very different people— friends—told me how great it was, that I had to read it, and that I didn’t have to be a “dog person” to enjoy it. It took me a bit of time to get to it, but I’m happy to report it’s all true. And the literary world agrees: not only did the novel win the 2018 National Book Award, but it also attracted rave reviews and was hailed as “a subtle, unassuming masterpiece” and “a poignant exploration of love, friendship, death, grief, art and literature.” But there was another aspect to the book’s breakout success, as the New York Times headline proclaimed: “With The Friend, Sigrid Nunez Becomes an Overnight Literary Sensation, 23 Years and Eight Books Later.” Although her earlier work was well received and well respected, a bestseller was a new phenomenon.
Sigrid Nunez was born in New York in 1951, the youngest of three, to a Panamanian Chinese father and German war-bride mother. Her father worked in hospital kitchens and as a waiter in various Chinese restaurants. Nunez grew up in the projects, went on to study English at Barnard College, and later got a master of fine arts from Columbia University. When she graduated, she worked as an editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books.
Her first autobiographical novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), was named the Association for Asian American Studies’ best novel of the year. She’s also won the Whiting Award, the Rome Prize, and various other literary awards. She’s the author of a fictional biography about Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s pet, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998), and a highly regarded novel about friendship and political activism in the late 1960s called The Last of Her Kind (2006).
But more recently, Nunez has returned to an intimate voice, free-ranging, a kind of faux memoir that harks back to her first book. The Friend revolves around a woman whose best friend and mentor has killed himself. As Nunez has said, she wanted to explore the emotional aftershock of a suicide. To complicate the story—and make it quite marvellous—the narrator agrees to take care of the dog her friend had adopted: a 180-pound Great Dane.
Nunez followed up this remarkable novel with another work that features a similar voice and sensibility. What Are You Going Through also deals with death and friendship and grief, but this time the connection is with a friend who’s dying of cancer. Both novels are rich with allusions to movies, books, ideas, political urgency, imbued with Nunez’s capacious intelligence.
Sigrid Nunez spoke to me from her apartment in New York last May.
Eleanor Wachtel: Your two most recent novels are kind of companion pieces; they speak to each other and to us in different ways. They also converse with other literary works, including fairy tales. What is it about fairy tales? Why do they have such a presence in your work?
Sigrid Nunez: Fairy tales were some of my earliest reading and were, more or less, my introduction to literature. From the beginning, I loved fairy tales. My mother would read them to me. Once I learned to read myself, I would read them over and over again. I’d go to the library and come home with The Red Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, The Yellow Fairy Book. That was a huge influence on me. The wonderful thing about fairy tales, the way they ring so true, is that anything can happen, no matter how strange. I also love the idea of metamorphosis: a person could become a tree or a bird. There are lots of animals in fairy tales, and I love stories about animals, and animals themselves. I feel like fairy tales have always been with me and have always been an inspiration to me.
Wachtel: In your latest book, What Are You Going Through, two old friends put aside other more contemporary reading in favour of a volume of the world’s best folk and fairy tales, stories of gods and heroes, princes and peasants, giants and little people, witches, tricksters, and animals, animals, animals. You mention these stories ringing true, but it’s interesting because at the same time, metamorphosis is so fantastic. What are the pleasures and truths these stories offer?
Nunez: There are these morals that if you behave one way, you’ll be punished, and if you behave another way, you’ll be rewarded. One of the basic stories from fairy tales and myth is that a stranger appears in some kind of need, poor and troubled and desperate for a cup of water or a piece of bread or a roof for a night. And certain people behave selfishly and don’t want to help this person, and other people behave with goodness and generosity. And then it turns out, in fact, that the stranger was some kind of powerful person in disguise, a king or a God. And then there’s a reward. Often that reward will be a marriage to that person, if the good person is a young woman. In a lot of fairy tales, cleverness is rewarded. There’s some kind of difficulty, some kind of challenge, some kind of test. If you show a certain amount of cleverness, you win. But often some being in the animal world or some supernatural figure helps you get through the test. There’s a kind of reality in the fairy tales. Bad things always happen in fairy tales, however they might end. And this is presented as the way of the world without any sentimentality. And that, I think, is an important idea to learn early on.
Wachtel: It’s important to learn that bad things happen in the world?
Nunez: It’s important to learn, yes. There’s an attitude toward children, as if they’re not able to take in certain things about the world. But children love fairy tales because they see that truth; they see the real world reflected in those stories. They don’t really need to be protected from that in the way that adults sometimes think.
Wachtel: The narrator in What Are You Going Through says that her own favourite story is “The Six Swans” from the Brothers Grimm. Is that yours too?
Nunez: I think that is, or at least was, my favourite fairy tale. I was taken by that story for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s the loyalty of the sister, who has been made to keep a vow of silence while her brothers have been bewitched and turned into swans. And meanwhile, she’s knitting garments for them. When she won’t break her vow of silence, she’s told she’s going to be burned as a witch. She’s on the pyre, still knitting away, trying to get that last garment done, when the swans appear. They land on the ground around her, and she throws a garment over each of them. But the last one isn’t finished yet; a sleeve is missing. So that brother transforms back into a human, but he keeps one left wing. And I’ve always had a thing about swans anyway.
Wachtel: What kind of thing about swans? Just their sheer beauty?
Nunez: Yes, their beauty. They’re magical creatures. I also studied ballet when I was young, and there is that association of swans with ballet.
Wachtel: Not only are there references to fairy tales in both your recent novels, the stories themselves in some ways have the shape of fairy tales. At certain moments, the central characters even look at their own experience that way: for example, the narrator of The Friend observes that she’s in one of those stories where a person is put to a test, one of those fables where someone encounters a stranger—could be human, could be beast—who’s in need of help. Have there been times in your own life when you’ve imagined yourself in a fairy tale?
Nunez: Not since I was a little girl. I was the kind of child who was always imagining she was some kind of a creature, always playing pretend: now I’m a horse, now I’m a rabbit or the mother of my stuffed animals, or my stuffed animals come alive during the night. I held on to that fantasy for a long time. That was a part of childhood imaginative play: imaginary friends. But it was different from actually imagining yourself in a story. For me, it was more like imagining that this was really the way life was. I remember I associated my mother with witches, in fact, partly because she had such a way with animals. She was so well known for being able to help animals in trouble that if people who lived in our area found a hurt or a stray animal, they would bring it to her. So I used to think maybe she was a witch.
Wachtel: Well, the good kind, if she was a healer.
Nunez: The good kind, yes. When you’re a child, you do things, and you think, I hid that so well. I cleaned that mess up so well. How does she know? It seemed to me that she had keen senses and sort of supernatural powers because I was totally unable to put anything over on her. She was extremely aware. She was very sharp.
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Wachtel: You’ve said your novel The Friend began simply enough as a story about a woman grieving for a friend who killed himself. What was it about that situation that you wanted to explore?
Nunez: Before I started writing that book, I was aware that any number of people I knew had it in their heads that they might commit suicide. They weren’t making a cry for help. They weren’t making an attempt. I’m not talking about that kind of situation. But they had thought how they would leave this life at some time. And that struck me as quite remarkable. I had finished the book when one of those people did commit suicide.
Wachtel: And when you say remarkable, were you surprised or concerned that they could imagine ending their lives that way?
Nunez: I was concerned, but I probably wasn’t that surprised because so many people have suicidal thoughts, even if they never come close to it. It’s not like I’ve known many people who’ve committed suicide. It’s such a strange thing, no matter how much you see of it. It goes so against nature. Humans are the only animal that commits suicide. I feel like suicide is endlessly fascinating because it remains a mystery. You can never really understand what somebody is going through when they come to that extreme, except in cases where the person is dying, or something has happened to them, and they leave a note and they explain it. So often that’s not how it happens. The person does not leave a note or, even according to the people closest to them, clues that this was going to happen.
Wachtel: And you question whoever came up with the term note. I had never thought of it before because it’s almost like a single word, suicide note. It’s something your narrator turns over in her mind as she’s also thinking about various literary suicides or pacts or famous suicide sites.
Nunez: She does wonder, as I do, Why is it called a note? Why isn’t it called a suicide letter? In other languages, it’s not always called a note. It is called a letter of farewell or whatever. I also think the reason I was drawn to it as a subject is because so many writers commit suicide.
Wachtel: Do you have any theories about why that is?
Nunez: I don’t really, but that’s what I mean about the mystery of suicide. People say that it’s partly because a person has to be alone a lot in order to be a writer. But many writers live rich social lives and have families and so on, even if they are doing their work alone. But it is true that depression is something that does afflict writers, many writers, and that would, of course, help explain it.
Wachtel: The narrator addresses herself to the friend who killed himself. He is the you to whom she’s speaking. What is it about the loss of this friendship that the narrator mourns so deeply? What kind of relationship did she have with this man?
Nunez: I think it has a lot to do with his connection to her past, to her youth. By the time he actually takes his life, they’ve fallen a bit out of touch, but they have known each other for decades. And although he was her professor, he was not much older than her. They’re basically the same age, same generation. She was a writing and literature student of his. And she did have an enormous crush on him. He was not in love with her. They had sex this one time. They were good friends before, and they remained good friends after, even though she was humiliated that he never wanted to be with her romantically again. And then he had three wives, and all three marriages ended with him being estranged from those women. Meanwhile, because they did not have a marriage, she and he were able to stay close. He was one of her oldest friends, somebody she greatly admired as a writer and as a thinker. And I don’t think their friendship was anything unique. In fact, many people have good friends they’ve known for a long time whom they might have felt romantically about at one time. It was a deep friendship, but there was nothing very unusual about it.
Wachtel: She says that unlike others, she never got her heart broken by this man. Should we believe her?
Nunez: The therapist doesn’t seem to believe her. She tells us that it seems to be the therapist’s view that she did get her heart broken. And that it was because of that and the unrequited nature of the love she feels for this man that she has remained single her whole life. So it’s certainly possible. That’s years after they’ve met. It’s clear that she could fall in love with him all over again at any time.
Wachtel: Reading this pair of novels, The Friend and What Are You Going Through, is like listening to someone share confidences. There’s intimacy and the irresistible pull of the tale unfolding. Can you talk about the voice in these books? It’s one that you say you’ve rediscovered.
Nunez: It isn’t something I think about consciously before I sit down to write. I was writing The Friend, and I knew it was going to be in the first person. I wanted it to have the tone of an intimate voice, the same tone you might have in a love letter, a hushed, intimate voice. I didn’t intend to have the entire narrative addressed to the mentor who commits suicide. I never thought of it as a letter. It was just the tone I was after. For part of the book, when she says you, she’s talking to him. But for whole other sections of the book, it becomes a straightforward first-person narrative. He disappears as the addressee. It came naturally to me. I went along. I finished the book. I felt the tone was consistent and the way I wanted it. When it was finished, I realized how close it was to my first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God. I realized that it was the same voice, the same sensibility, perhaps the same narrator, older. And then when I started What Are You Going Through, I recognized that this was the same voice and the same sensibility as The Friend. The narrator of What Are You Going Through, the way she thinks, the way she reflects, the way she sees things, the way she observes things—those are all exactly as the narrator of The Friend would think and reflect and observe. As you said, the two books seem to be in conversation with each other or are a pair. That is absolutely right. Not planned. But I feel that What Are You Going Through came out of The Friend.
Wachtel: And that first novel was autobiographical. I know that what happens in these novels didn’t happen to you, but in terms of the person who’s thinking and reflecting, and the voice, is that close to your own?
Nunez: My first book is the only book I’ve written that could really be called autofiction, even though a certain amount of it is fictional. However, all of them have elements from my own life, all of them have some autobiography in them, and in the most recent ones, the huge autobiographical thing there is the sensibility. The way these narrators see the world and human experience is certainly my own. I teach writing, just like the narrators of The Friend and What Are You Going Through. It’s clear there’s not a lot of distance between the author and the narrators. But neither of these two more recent books are autobiographical in the way of my first novel.
Wachtel: The Friend began with you thinking about friends and suicide, but then, as you’ve described it, a dog simply showed up. What happened?
Nunez: Yes. I don’t make outlines or big plans before I write a book. It’s just not the way I work. I started this book with the suicide of the narrator’s friend. I was thirty pages in when I decided that at the funeral, wife number three would say to the narrator, Do you mind if I call you? I want to talk to you about something. The narrator has no idea what. And she goes to meet this woman. I thought, What am I going to have her want from the narrator? It was almost like a childish feeling. Oh, I could have a dog in my novel. I could have a great big dog in my novel. I decided that that’s what would come next. And I do love animals. I’ve always wanted to write a book that had an animal that was an important character—a dog, which would be the most obvious choice because we have such a special relationship with dogs. I had written my book about Virginia and Leonard Woolf ’s pet marmoset. But that was largely non-fiction. I didn’t invent that story; that’s really in the Bloomsbury Archives. I enjoyed that very much, writing about the Woolfs’ pets, their monkey, their dogs. After that I thought it would be wonderful to have another animal in one of my books.
Wachtel: As you say, it’s an impressive dog, a giant dog, a harlequin Great Dane, meaning a striking white coat with black splotches, weighing 180 pounds. Why this particular type of dog?
Nunez: For one thing, that’s a breed I love. I had a dog, and it actually appears in the book. That part is autobiographical. I call the dog Bo, half Great Dane, half German shepherd. And my family got a Great Dane, but I was already out of the house by then. He was a huge, beautiful dog—not a harlequin—named Taurus.
First was the idea that her taking this dog is supposed to be a kind of test for her. It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be a challenge. I knew I wanted it to be a big dog, a troublesome dog, and not some dog she could just carry around in her purse but one that was old, for one thing, ate a lot, was expensive, and that she couldn’t hide, as she lived in a place where her lease stipulated she could not have a dog. So it made sense to have it be this very large dog. And then I wanted the harlequin because I wanted to have that visual image. It is such a striking image. I used to go to a café on Greene Street that was a former art gallery. It was a large space. You could take your laptop there and work all afternoon if you wanted. Occasionally a woman came in with two dogs, and one of them was this enormous harlequin Dane. And the woman was so kind. She let me visit with the dog while she was reading her paper or whatever. I didn’t think about this until long after the book was finished. I’m sure that played a role in my choosing this particular breed and type for the character of Apollo, the harlequin Dane.
Wachtel: And there’s every reason the narrator shouldn’t agree when asked by her late friend’s wife to take in the Great Dane that he’d rescued. She lives in a small rent-controlled apartment that doesn’t allow dogs, but she takes him. Why?
Nunez: When I came up with this idea, I was thinking, What would you do?—by you, I mean everyone. She’s trapped into it to some extent. She’s in a certain state. She’s grieving. She’s bewildered. She doesn’t know why her friend committed suicide. And now this has been thrust on her. If she doesn’t take the dog, the dog will probably be destroyed. I guess she just doesn’t know how to say no. The thought is unbearable to her: if her friend could somehow know what happened to the dog, how terrible that would be for him. It’s silly, of course, because he’s dead, so he’s beyond feeling. I think it’s not so much that she feels for the dog at that moment; she just feels helpless to do anything else. She’s not thinking straight, as her friends keep telling her. She’s not thinking about the future, just that moment, one day at a time, as it were. And then, of course, she ends up developing a serious relationship with this dog.
Wachtel: The narrator meditates on our fascination with animals and their appearance in myth and folklore, and in particular, the canine-human bond. What makes it so interesting and unique?
Nunez: We really do have such a special relationship with dogs. We’ve bred them to be a certain kind of creature with a passionate attachment to people. There isn’t anything else like that: their incredible loyalty, their uncritical attitude toward people. I’ve known many people who have loved their dogs so much and have been so loved by those dogs. And dogs are the only animal we have that kind of relationship with. I mean, people love their cats too, and I think there’s nothing more special than the feline. But it’s a real, solid friendship that a person has with a dog. And when people lose their dog, lose the friendship of their dog, they suffer a lot and don’t always show it because they feel a certain amount of shame about it, that they shouldn’t be grieving this much: it was just a dog; it was just an animal and not another person. I have received so much mail from people who read The Friend and told me about their relationship with a dog, about losing a dog and how incredible their grief was. And I find that incredibly moving.
Wachtel: There’s a scene from fairly early in the novel where the narrator has just brought the dog Apollo home to her apartment and there’s a mention of Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye terrier who spent every night for over fourteen years at the grave of his master, who died in Edinburgh in 1858. Meanwhile, Apollo appears to be depressed. What do we really know about the emotional life of animals?
Nunez: I think we might underestimate how much dogs know and how much they feel. Their inability to talk, of course, means we can’t ever really know what’s going on with them. And what struck me so much about this situation in my book was that, as her mentor’s wife says, you can’t explain death to a dog. So here was this dog. One day, his best friend, the person he cared about more than anything in the world, just never came home. And I thought, We people can say, This person died and we’re not ever going to see that person again. But how does a dog figure this out? What happens to the dog, to the dog’s mind, to the dog’s heart, to the dog’s feelings? And in the case of dogs bred to be companions and, above all, protectors, isn’t it possible that they go through this trauma of thinking, Who’s protecting my master now? What kind of trouble might he be in? I should be there. I don’t think it is far-fetched to think this might happen in the dog’s mind.
Wachtel: As you said, the voice of the narrator in both The Friend and your latest novel, What Are You Going Through, is an older version of the voice in A Feather on the Breath of God, which, like a lot of first novels, was a story you had to get out of your system, your own family’s story. I’d like to hear a bit about your family. What was it like to grow up with immigrant parents from very different cultures? Can you talk a bit about them, their backgrounds, starting with your father?
Nunez: My father was half Panamanian and half Chinese. He was Chinese identified. That was his language. He did not speak Spanish at all. He worked in Chinese restaurants his whole life. He was working as an illegal alien in New York’s Chinatown when World War II broke out, and he ended up in the army and with the occupying forces in southern Germany, which is where he met my mother. She was a German war bride. He brought her to the States, and they lived in a housing project, the Brooklyn housing project in Fort Greene, the Fort Greene Houses. They moved to another housing project on Staten Island when I was about two. There were three daughters, and I was the youngest. My mother’s English became quite good, even though she always had this heavy German accent. My father’s English was never good. I was always fascinated by the idea of how they met, because when they did, they didn’t have a common language. All she had was some school English, and his English was quite poor. So it was a conflicted household. My mother’s idea was that she had these three children and that the children were hers, and she wanted to raise them as little German children, even though she never taught us the language when we were young. And my father was a withdrawn person. He worked all the time. He worked seven days a week, and he remained at such a distance from us. You could not get him to talk about his past, his life. So he was always a mystery to me. And that is one of the main reasons I wanted to write about him.
A Feather on the Breath of God begins: “The first time I ever heard my father speak Chinese was at Coney Island,” which is absolutely true. And my sisters and I, we said to our mother, “Why is Daddy singing?” That’s the way we heard it. We had run into some Chinese men there, friends of his from Chinatown. We never saw them again, nor did we ever meet any other of his Chinese friends. He had this whole separate life. And I always wondered, as I talk about in the book, if it would have been different if we had been sons instead of daughters. Maybe there would have been more of a relationship. The household was this very small apartment; nevertheless, the worlds of my mother and father were separate. And they did not get along. They stayed married. It was an unhappy marriage. My father died when he was sixty-two. I was in graduate school at the time. I wish I had been persistent in trying to find out about his life when I was younger because now all these questions will remain unanswered. I never met any of his relations. I never met any family on my father’s side.
Wachtel: Your mother was German. What did you know about her side of the family?
Nunez: When we were young, my mother took us to Germany and I met my grandmother. My grandfather had died by that time. My mother was a very nostalgic person. I was always hearing about Germany, the German life, German things. In the United States, Christmas morning is when you open presents. But we did so on Christmas Eve because that’s how the Germans do it. We didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, even though we were an American family. As I say, she was nostalgic. And she did talk a lot. She was the opposite of my father. But I didn’t really get to know my German relations either.
Wachtel: How do you think you were affected by being aware of your mother’s disappointment in her marriage?
Nunez: I’m not sure. I saw lots of other marriages as well, and I feel like what I’ve seen in marriage is reflected very much in the divorce rate, which I believe is 50 percent here. So many marriages did not seem happy or did not seem to work out. I certainly thought I would marry at some point and have a family, but I never did. I don’t think, though, that’s because of that unhappy marriage. I have two sisters, and they both married. In my first book I wrote about my parents’ marriage; that was something that did obsess me. As you say, a lot of first books are autobiographical because the writer seems to need to get something out of the way before she can go on to write other things. And I was certainly one of those writers. I wanted to reflect on that marriage and try to figure something out about and remember aspects of childhood and what it was like to grow up the child of immigrants who were not from the same place.
Wachtel: When you were growing up, how did you navigate the lack of communication?
Nunez: There was nothing to do but accept it. The first part of A Feather on the Breath of God is called Chang, and it’s about my father. When the book was published and I would read from it, quite a few Chinese Americans would say to me, Your father was not as unusual or strange or odd or eccentric as you think he was. A lot of that was because of his culture, about which I did not know a lot. For them, there was nothing unusual about the fact that he had never said to his children, I love you. That is not uncommon among Asian parents. So in a way, there was nothing to do growing up. You find yourself just having to accept it and make your own life. Whatever the cultural background, what young people do a lot is ignore their parents. They aren’t really thinking about their parents, I should say, until much later or when it’s too late. They don’t ignore them when they need them, and they don’t ignore them in all ways, but I think it would be an unusual preteen who would show a real passionate interest in what their parents were like when they were that age or what kind of dreams they have or what kind of relationship they have with their father. There’s a lack of curiosity, or at least there’s a lack of the intense curiosity one can have when one gets older.
Wachtel: Your latest novel, What Are You Going Through, also uses that straightforward narrative voice to explore another apparently simple idea that turns into something rich and moving. It’s about friendship, love, and death, and about stories themselves. The book began, you said, with the first line: “I went to hear a man give a talk.” The man, we later discover, is the narrator’s ex-partner, and it’s quite a talk he gives—cyberterrorism, bioterrorism, unmitigated disaster—arguing, among other things, against human reproduction. The narrator is warning about the end of things. But for her, the end of things is focused much more narrowly on her old friend who’s dying of cancer, the one she’s come to visit. In your previous novel, as we’ve just discussed, suicide was the theme. Here, it’s assisted death or euthanasia. What made you want to explore this idea?
Nunez: It’s interesting because here again I found myself saying, What would you do? The question was, What would you do if someone were to ask you to help them in this way? This is also something that has been on my mind, like suicide: this thing, this one experience that we all share. Everybody does have to leave this life at some point. Somebody asked me a question during a Q & A: Why are you so drawn to mortality? And I said, It’s more a question of mortality drawing me to it. When you start thinking about how you might leave this world, you then wonder, If I had a terminal illness and I knew for sure that there was no hope, how would I feel about euthanasia? How would I feel about taking my own life instead of going through agony and also not being myself at the end? You know, being in too much pain. It’s something I have thought about. Most people I know have thought about it, even if they’re not having big conversations about it. I did know early on that there would be this friend who had terminal cancer. And I let my mind go from there, one thing leading to another.
Wachtel: The narrator is ambivalent at first about helping her friend, who is not asking her to actually help her kill herself, but rather to be there with her because other people closer to her have refused, saying that they couldn’t bear it, that they would try to stop her. Did you by the end find an answer for yourself, what you would do? How do you think you would handle it?
Nunez: I really don’t know. This is something, again, similar to The Friend. The narrator says yes because she doesn’t know how to say no. When she first agrees, she’s horrified that she’s being asked this. Ultimately, she decides she will stay with her. And then the friend says, At some point I will take these drugs, but I won’t tell you the exact moment when I’m going to do it. And honestly, I can’t say I know what I would do. But there are a few places in the book where the narrator says, I’m doing this because I would want the same things she wants, and I would want somebody to be that friend to me. And I identify with that. I don’t think everyone feels that way, far from it. But a lot of people do feel that way.
Wachtel: The novel’s title comes from Simone Weil, the philosopher whom you quote in the epigraph, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’” What does that line mean to you?
Nunez: I came across that a long, long time ago in one of her essays, and I thought it was so striking, so well put, and so true. And to me, it means exactly that. By saying to him, What are you going through? the implication is: I’m listening. I’m listening. It isn’t necessarily, Tell me what’s the trouble? What are you suffering? What’s going on? I will help. I will know what to do. You don’t know what it is, and you might be helpless in the face of whatever that person is going through. But the one thing you can do is give it your attention. And she’s saying that’s what “love thy neighbour” means.
Wachtel: It’s funny because I also came across that line a long time ago. But I was surprised in your book because you mention that in French the question sounds quite different. And that’s not something I had heard before in French. Quel est ton tourment? What is your torment?
Nunez: What is your torment? is not English. Nobody would ever say, I’m so sorry to hear about your torment, or, I can’t imagine what your torment has been. We don’t have an exact way of saying this, but the way we say it in English is What are you going through? There really isn’t any other translation for that. It means What’s ailing you? What is your trouble?
Wachtel: Friendship is a theme of both your recent novels, The Friend and What Are You Going Through. It’s maybe not as sexy or dramatic as romance, but it’s rich terrain. What interests you about friendship?
Nunez: Everything. Now there are a lot of novels about friendship. When I was coming of age, it wasn’t so common. Novels were generally about family and marriage and love, the idea being, I think, that a friendship is not as important as a love relationship or a family relationship. And to me, friendship has been undervalued in novels, in fiction. For example, it wasn’t that long ago that Elena Ferrante started writing her books about the friendship between two Italian women that started with My Brilliant Friend. Because it was so popular and beloved and it got so much attention everywhere, people made a big thing about the fact that it was about that friendship. That’s how unusual it was for the writer to give that kind of attention to a long, long friendship between two women. I think it’s very rich. It certainly has been for me because I’ve written a lot about friendship.
Wachtel: Stories are also at the heart of your work, interwoven, unfolding within each other. Most are stories of women’s experience; and women’s stories, the narrator of What Are You Going Through says, are often sad stories. Do you think that’s true?
Nunez: Some people have read that to mean men’s stories aren’t sad. Although I did write it and I did mean it, I say carefully: it’s kind of a stupid thing to say. It’s just something that sounds good and was an interesting way to introduce what was going to come next. But if you isolate it, if you press on that sentence, it falls apart. Yes, of course, women’s stories are often sad stories. But immediately you say, Compared to men’s stories? Does that mean all human beings aren’t human? Isn’t it true that many people’s stories are sad stories? I wouldn’t exactly say I was being facetious, but I was looking at the particular sense that this is a sad woman’s story because it’s about the sadness of being a woman. I didn’t mean the way in which women’s rights are sad; I didn’t mean that men’s stories aren’t equally sad because of course, they are.
Wachtel: There’s a refrain in What Are You Going Through: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” And it’s the opening line from Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier. Perhaps more so nowadays, I’ll hear someone say they don’t want to read or watch something sad. What do you think about that?
Nunez: In the book, these two women watch this wonderful movie, Make Way for Tomorrow, from 1937—the director is Leo McCarey—and it’s unbelievably sad. Orson Welles called it the saddest movie ever made. And they’ve watched it. They’re weeping. And it’s not that they regret having watched it because a good story, beautifully told, no matter how sad, lifts you up. So there are different kinds of sad. But if something is sad and meaningful and beautiful and moving in a certain way, I think it’s uplifting. I’ve always felt that way.
Writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel loves books and their authors and has managed to gagner her vie by sharing that passion. Five selections of her interviews have been published, including Random Illuminations, a collection of reflections, correspondence, and conversations with Carol Shields; Original Minds; and for the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, The Best of Writers & Company.
Nunez, Sigrid THE FRIEND Riverhead (Adult Fiction) $25.00 2, 6 ISBN: 978-0-7352-1944-1
Quietly brilliant and darkly funny, Nunez's (Sempre Susan, 2011, etc.) latest novel finds her on familiar turf with an aggressively unsentimental interrogation of grief, writing, and the human-canine bond.
After her best friend and mentor's suicide, an unnamed middle-aged writing professor is bequeathed his well-behaved beast of a dog. Apollo is a majestic, if aging, Great Dane, whom her friend--like all the human characters, unnamed--found abandoned in Brooklyn and kept, against the rather reasonable protests of his third and final wife. And so, in the midst of her overwhelming grief for the man whose life has anchored hers, the woman agrees to take in the animal, despite the exceedingly clear terms of her rent-stabilized lease. Apollo, too, is grieving, in his doggy way--after his master's death, he waited by the door round the clock ("you can't explain death to a dog," says Wife Three); now, in the woman's care, he throws himself listlessly on the bed, all 180 pounds of him. And though she is a self-professed cat person--not because she prefers them, but because they are less indiscriminately devoted ("Give me a pet that can get along without me")--the two become unlikely companions in mourning, eventually forming the kind of bond Rilke once described as love: "two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other." In contemplating her current situation--the loss, the dog--the woman is oriented by art: not just Rilke but Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee, the relentlessly grim Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever, Joy Williams, Milan Kundera, the British writer J.R. Ackerley in love with his dog. It is a lonely novel: rigorous and stark, so elegant--so dismissive of conventional notions of plot--it hardly feels like fiction.
Breathtaking both in pain and in beauty; a singular book.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Nunez, Sigrid: THE FRIEND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A509244139/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c99bf97b. Accessed 3 July 2025.
"When I was a kid and wanted to grow up to be a writer," Sigrid Nunez says. "I assumed I would be writing about animals and children, because that's what I cared about and read about. But I never did."
Instead, beginning with A Feather on the Breath of God in 1995, Nunez wrote novels musing on questions of identity, family, friendship, and commitment, esteemed by fellow writers and critics for their elegant prose and sensitive understanding of complex relationships. An animal did appear in Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, but Nunez describes that playful short book as "90% nonfiction; it's really about the Woolves [Mitz's owners, Virginia and Leonard Woolf]."
But in The Friend, which Riverhead will publish in February, a Great Dane named Apollo is very much a central character. The unnamed narrator reluctantly takes Apollo in after a close friend commits suicide, even though her apartment is tiny and dogs are not allowed. They form a strong bond based on shared grief, as the narrator faces an eviction threat and recalls incidents from her longtime friendship with the dead man.
As is the case with much of Nunez's fiction, the novel's roots are in personal experience. "A few years ago, I discovered that I knew quite a few people who were planning to commit suicide, at least in their heads," she says. "They were stockpiling pills, they had said in conversation with me that this was what they were thinking. I realized that suicide was on everyone's mind, and, like all writers, I write about the things that are troubling me. Then, while I was writing this book, one of them did it. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, which I had already written about as a famous suicide site."
Nunez shakes her head over the weirdness of that fiction-reality coincidence and continues: "There's a lot of material from my life in my books, but they're not really autobiographical, in the sense that they're not about my life. So, in A Feather on the Breath of God I write about my parents, I write about this Russian immigrant, I write about the world of dance, but it isn't an autobiography; so much is left out. You take things from life, but then you realize that the needs of the novel force you to change things to make it more artful."
It was entirely different, Nunez says, with Sempre Susan, her 2011 memoir about her relationship with the formidable critic, essayist, and novelist Susan Sontag. "There I took absolutely no liberties," she notes. "Of course, my memory could be faulty, but I didn't make composite scenes or composite dialogue; it had to be strictly what I remembered. Since so many people knew Susan, had I invented something, someone would have come forward and said, 'This is a lie,' but even people who didn't necessarily like the book never said it was distorted." (She did get one funny correction from a man who knew them both, about her recollection of seeing a hole in the underarm of a coat when Sontag strode forward to hail a cab; Nunez assumed it was a split seam that Sontag, characteristically, never bothered to have mended. "Peter Cameron, a good friend of mine and a wonderful writer, got in touch and said, "You know, some of those coats are made with a vent!'")
In both fiction and nonfiction, Nunez frequently mulls over the contradiction between the desire to preserve experiences or people by writing about them, and the fear that writing about something will inevitably falsify it. "It comes up in The Friend too, the idea that if you write about an experience you might actually end up losing it," she says. "Because then the memory you keep is the memory of writing about it, not the memory of having the experience. In the same way that people take all these photographs of a place they visit and keep looking at them; as time goes by, they're not remembering the place, they're remembering the photographs. There is always that risk, but even if it's not factually true, a thing you write about can still be true to the experience, true to the imagination."
Grappling with the nature and purpose of writing does not unduly preoccupy the students depicted in The Friend, which takes as one of its principal subjects the mistaken notions people have about the writer's life. Like Nunez, the narrator teaches creative writing, and her pupils do not seem to her to have the sense of vocation she believes is required. "Shouldn't we be studying more successful writers?" one asks, concerned that "so much of the assigned reading includes books that failed to make money or are now out of print." When the narrator assigns Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, an inspiration to aspiring authors for nearly a century with its high-minded view of writers as a kind of priesthood totally devoted to. their art, her students think it's "ridiculous."
Nunez insists that she didn't intend to pick on creative writing programs. (And she's careful to say that none of The Friends students are based on hers.) "It's not just students," she says. "I go to conferences and meet people who have other careers, and they too have this idea that becoming a writer and getting published is going to bring all these rewards that in fact it is not going to bring. First of all, writing requires so much isolation and solitude, which not everyone has the constitution for; it's a lonely activity. Then there's this Philip Roth quote that has always stayed with me, 'It's just' like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.' There's so much failure and rejection in a writer's life. So many of the best writers--like Woolf and Kafka--were constantly feeling like failures and thinking their work was complete shit. Yet I see a lot of people seeming to think this is the way for them to get self-esteem? My concern is that people have an idea about writing and being a writer that is really misguided."
At 65, Nunez is willing to acknowledge the possibility that part , of her concern comes from the eternal "this younger generation" finger-pointing people do as they get older. "I've been reading Elizabeth Hardwick's collected essays, and in one she talks about Rilke and says that his idea of writing as a religion is gone. That essay was written in the '70s! But I do think it's true that it's not how people think of being a writer anymore."
Nunez studied creative writing with Hardwick as an undergraduate at Barnard and went on to get an MFA from Columbia while working as Robert Silvers's assistant at the New York Review of Books. With examples like theirs and Sontag's, she says, "It would have been very hard not to think about writing as the most difficult but important thing you could do." She adds: "Working at the Review, if anything, the impression you got was, I'll never be good enough, I'll never work hard enough, I'll never be devoted enough. These people are staying up all night over their sentences!"
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
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Smith, Wendy. "FOR LOVE OF A DOG: In her new novel, The Friend, Sigrid Nunez explores friendship and grief." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 47, 20 Nov. 2017, pp. 42+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A517262051/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=def4b2a6. Accessed 3 July 2025.
THE FRIEND BY SIGRID NUNEZ NEW YORK: RIVERHEAD. 224 PAGES. $25.
I don't know whether or not The Friend is a good novel or even, strictly speaking, if it's a novel at all--so odd is its construction--but after I'd turned the last page of the book I found myself sorry to be leaving the company of a feeling intelligence that had delighted me and even, on occasion, given joy.
The narrator is a writer whose great and good friend of thirty years (a man who'd once been her mentor) has committed suicide. She goes into shock and stops working: "I missed my deadline. Was given a compassionate extension. Missed that deadline, too. Now the editor thinks I'm malingering." She also begins speaking to the dead man: "I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn't do. And after all, you were not the unhappiest person we knew." Stumbling through days and weeks of unremitting pain, she often feels overtaken by a "fog that descends at certain moments, unsettling as amnesia. (What am I doing in this classroom? Why, in this mirror, does my face look so weird? I wrote that? What could I have meant?)" Certainly, the reader is encouraged to believe that this is the friend of the title. But wait.
The suicide's widow tells the narrator she must come get the dead man's dog, that he had always counted on her taking it should something happen to him. Oh no, the narrator says, she can't take the dog--a handsome Great Dane--no pets allowed in her building, but the widow is adamant. The narrator capitulates and takes the dog: whereupon she not only falls passionately in love with the animal (who's been named Apollo), but also soon begins to experience a sense of communion with him that is stronger, more evocative, more original than any she has known before. Daily her sense of wonder grows over the miracle of living with this beautiful, intelligent creature who starts her thinking about the inner life of his species: "They don't commit suicide. They don't weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds." They also brilliantly intuit the moods of the person with whom they are living.
One night, in the course of tearing the place apart (he's been left alone for too many hours), Apollo shreds a book the narrator has left on her coffee table. Weeks later, as she sits reading on the couch, the dog looks at her "imploringly," then goes over to the coffee table, puts the paperback replacement of this same book in his mouth, and brings it to her.
A world of meaning begins to accumulate around this relationship that now irradiates the narrator's own inner life. She remembers the time when the dead man, then her teacher, assigned her class Letters to a Young Poet, and she first came across Rilke's famous definition of love: "Two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other." Now, some forty years later, having assigned the text to her own writing class, she reads the book again and thinks, "What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?"
She begins hibernating with the dog, feeling less and less need to leave the apartment. It occurs to her that he has given her an excuse to do that which she has always found most compelling. Her therapist has her number. One day he says to her," Strays is what a writer I recently read calls those who, for one reason or another, and despite whatever they might have wanted earlier in life, never really become a part of life, not in the way most people do. They may have serious relationships, they may have friends, even a sizable circle, they may spend large portions of their time in the company of others. But they never marry and they never have children. On holidays, they join some family or other group. This goes on year after year, until they finally find it in themselves to admit that they'd really rather just stay home."
"But you must see a lot of people like that," the narrator says to the therapist.
"Actually," he tells her, "I don't."
Stitched through these absorptions with the dog and the dead man is an ongoing rumination on the writing life, as well as on the New York literary world, where the narrator feels herself not central but nonetheless rooted. Traveling to attend an awards ceremony, she spots two people on the subway and knows immediately they are going to the same place. She can always tell her compatriots: "Like the time I passed three men in a booth in a restaurant in Chelsea and pegged them even before I heard one say, That's the great thing about writing for The New Yorker."
The relation between writing itself and the influence of the literary scene sometimes weighs on her: "Even though writing isn't supposed to be a competition, I could see that most of the time writers believed that it was.... People were constantly getting worked up over who got what and who got left out and how horribly unfair the whole business was." The narrator quotes John Updike as having once said that "a nice person wouldn't become a writer." The problem, he implied, was the monumental load of shame, doubt, and self-loathing most writers carry about from the cradle to the grave.
The dog, the suicide, the writing life: These are the three strands of thought and feeling that make up the weave of The Friend. They don't always mesh or make a satisfying design, but they are held together by the tone of the narrator's voice: light, musing, curious, and somehow wonderfully sturdy. Time and again this sturdiness rescues the narrator from falling into self-pity or self-dramatization. In one instance, it avoids the maudlin by ringing a delicious change on the register of what is now called magical thinking:
I tell the therapist about those uncanny
moments, after I first heard the news, when I
believed there'd been a mistake. You were
gone but not dead. More like you were just
missing ... missing, not dead. Meaning you
could come back ... and if you could come
back, of course you would. Akin to that brief
period years ago when I believed it was just
stress or fatigue or some odd phase I was
going through, and once whatever the trouble
was had passed my looks would come back.
Time passes, and Apollo grows dangerously old. He becomes incontinent, collapses on the sidewalk, stinks up the house. Summer comes and both dog and mistress are rescued by a sympathetic friend who treats them to a couple of weeks at the shore.
Day after day the dying dog lies in the sun on the lawn in front of the seaside cottage while the narrator sits on the porch reading, or lazily watching the flying patterns of the multitude of butterflies around the place. Then one day a gull cries out--and here are the last lines of the book:
"Oh, what a sound. What could that gull have seen to make it cry out like that?
"The butterflies are in the air again, moving off, in the direction of the shore.
"I want to call your name, but the word dies in my throat.
"Oh, my friend, my friend!"
Now, it seemed to me, The Friend had arrived. The heartbreak inscribed in those final words fills the page to the margin and beyond with the penetrating loneliness-the sheer textured burden of life itself--that all of Sigrid Nunez's fine writing had been at brilliant pains to keep both within sight and at bay.
Some twenty pages from the end and out of the blue, Nunez goes "meta" on us. In an imaginary sequence of questions and answers the author suggests that none of what she's described has actually happened: The dead man did try to kill himself, but he did not succeed, he's still alive; he wasn't, as we were told, born in England, he's an American; and the dog was a dachshund, not a Great Dane. The narrator has simply been imagining how she would have felt if the man had died, and she had had to take the dog. These factually disguised details, she suggests, are why she feels free to call her book a novel.
I realized, reading these pages--which by the way strike the only awkward note in the book--that never once did I experience The Friend as a work of fiction, never felt the narrator was anyone other than the author herself or that anything she described hadn't had its origin in some actual occurrence. From beginning to end, I thought myself engaged with what we now call the personal narrative.
So I ask myself what it is that makes a reader believe she can easily tell the difference between a fictional and a nonfictional narrator, and I am not asking the question rhetorically. I do not have some clever answer up my sleeve--I genuinely desire an answer to the question. Then I stop asking the question, because clearly there are times when the point is not worth belaboring. If the writing in a book is such that it moves the heart, stimulates the intellect, and enlivens the spirit, we can conclude that it is a work of literature--period--and as such is entitled to make its own laws. On that note I leave The Friend to go out into the world of the common reader, where it is sure to connect swiftly with its natural soul mates, of whom I am certain there will be many.
Vivian Gomick is the author of the memoir The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). (See Contributors.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
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Gornick, Vivian. "Dog Be with You: Sigrid Nunez's novel of a writer and her pet." Artforum International, vol. 56, no. 6, Feb. 2018, p. S23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A527771676/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7ebd409. Accessed 3 July 2025.
THE FRIEND By Sigrid Nunez 212 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.
Love and loss: the twin preoccupations of life and literature. Humans crave love that is lasting, loyal, perhaps even redemptive, and yet we find ourselves heartbroken time and again. Fortunately, when things are really bad, we can always get a puppy.
Certainly, the puppy option is available to writers -- in life, of course, but more to the point, in their writing. They're handy literary devices. Dogs nose their way into all genres, and readers grow no more tired of them than they tire of the people crowding their books. Plus, dog love is simple; they instinctively understand when people are suffering.
The dog in Sigrid Nunez's new novel, ''The Friend,'' is an almost mystically grand beast named Apollo, a 180-pound Harlequin Great Dane. His size corresponds to the grief Nunez's narrator is living with as the story opens. Her much-loved friend and literary mentor has committed suicide; within about 30 pages, and reluctantly at first, the narrator is living not only with her grief for this man but with his equally bereft dog.
The dog's arrival is the central story, but the novel moves artfully through the narrator's memories and her present sorrow. Anger, too. The character best developed in this haze of grief is the one who dies before we ever meet him -- and to whom the narrator directs a kind of epistolary monologue. The book, written in second person, addresses the dead friend, and sometimes his dog; the distinction is not always important. (''His hazel eyes are strikingly human,'' she tells her friend; ''they remind me of yours.'')
In the narrator's contemplation, we learn the mentor-author was also a thrice-married womanizer for whom sex was a creative force: ''You yourself never wrote better than during those periods when you were having lots of good sex,'' she recalls him saying. His promiscuity is a character flaw that makes him especially vulnerable to physical decline. One day, inevitably, a mirror tells an ugly truth: The writer's aging body has lost its genius. ''A power has been taken away, it can never be given back again,'' the narrator thinks.
It's evidence of a far deeper loss. The gulf between the friend's worldview, particularly his devotion to writing, and that of his students has grown wide; young writers are hostile to his values. The students find the whole idea of the writer as a gifted truth-teller -- as a kind of god -- contemptible. They sneer at the idea of art as a high calling with the same disdain they have for men who call female students ''dear.''
Is any of this enough to end one's life over? Well -- but what is? And in any case, in this novel (in which dozens of authors are referenced, deepening its literary flavor), one man's fatal despair suggests something much larger has been lost as our culture has evolved. It happens that Apollo likes to be read to, and Rilke especially appeals to him. Both the narrator and her mentor found inspiration in Rilke, who approached writing reverently. Young writers now ''do not feel that Rilke is speaking to them. ... They say it's a lie that writing is a religion requiring the devotion of a priest. They say it's ridiculous,'' she says. ''There was a time when young writers ... believed that Rilke's world was eternal. I agree with my students that that world has vanished. But at their age it would not have occurred to me that it could vanish, let alone in my lifetime.''
There: despair. It lurks all around, as one immersed in grief quickly learns. A woman the narrator meets while walking Apollo, for instance, is preoccupied with the terrible suffering of China's Tibetan mastiffs and all other dogs bred ''for the traits people want them to have,'' she says, adding, ''I shudder to think what it'll be like 50 or a hundred years from now ... but by then, the whole earth will have been destroyed.'' The idea seems to comfort her; one way or another, this decline has an end.
But what about the dog -- does something bad happen to the dog, we want to know? Even as Apollo looms large (literally) in the story, there are long stretches in which he does not appear at all. The contemplation of writing and the loss of integrity in our literary life form the heart of the novel. With the death of the author-friend, a world is slipping away. Apollo brings comfort because he somehow intuits this -- after all, he too knows what it is to be no longer wanted. And because he is one of such a large breed, Apollo -- aptly named for a god of antiquity -- is not long for this world himself, most probably.
''The Friend'' could almost carry a trigger warning for writers, teachers and readers, except that Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts -- the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence. She addresses important ideas unpretentiously and offers wisdom for any aspiring writer who, as the narrator fears, may never know this dear, intelligent friend -- or this world that is dying.
But is it dying?
Perhaps. But with ''The Friend,'' Nunez provides evidence that, for now, it survives.
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CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY JOOHEE YOON)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
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Soderlind, Lori. "For the Love of a Dog." The New York Times Book Review, 11 Mar. 2018, p. 8(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A530505677/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e56a088f. Accessed 3 July 2025.
The Friend By Sigrid Nunez Riverhead Books. 224p $25
Sigrid Nunez mines the effect of suicide on family, friends and even the pet dog in her National Book Award winner, The Friend. Although the title would seem to refer to the dog pictured on the cover, the storyline is deliberately ambiguous--like almost everything in this book. Several friends are mentioned in the novel, but the three friends significant to the story are an unnamed narrator, her unnamed mentor and a dog.
The multifaceted narrative primarily attempts to process the consequences of a mentor's suicide through the writing of a lengthy letter that is suffused with "Catholic guilt." Part of the enterprise is his Great Dane, named Apollo, who, as the narrator describes him, is good, kind, smart, warm, loyal, honest and, like the Greek god, inspirational--everything that most people are not. The dog's "large hazel eyes are strikingly human," the narrator writes to her mentor, who committed suicide. "They remind me of yours." The statement is key to this postmodern novel, where what you see is what you get.
This is also a story about teaching students who dislike reading and consider it senseless to study literary classics because they are not bestsellers. The narrator mentions students who take the sex scenes out of their stories in order to workshop their writing, believing they might be expelled in the #MeToo era. She discusses postmodern fiction, qualities of good writing, the perils of publishing quality literature and the difficulties of caring for a grieving dog while suffering from depression.
After her mentor killed himself, his dog sat at the door and continually howled in mourning. His howling irritated the mentor's third wife (a.k.a. Wife Number Three) and caused her to ask the narrator to adopt him. We later learn that the mentor had told his wife to give Apollo to the narrator if anything happened to him.
The dog brings irony, warmth and thoughts of her mentor to her barren life. No wonder the narrator won't give him up, even if it means violating the terms of the lease to her Manhattan apartment and possibly being homeless and even though the dog slobbers and tends to have accidents.
Because the mentor did not leave a suicide note, the narrator can only speculate about his reasons, which she does. There are no clues in the last email he sent her; it contained a list of books he thought might help her research. One of their last conversations suggested he was unhappy, since it concerned Cambodian women who nearly cried themselves blind. Perhaps, she thinks, he was depressed because as he aged, he became physically unattractive.
She tells her deceased mentor about her visits to a counselor, where she asks whether people have the right to commit suicide and why people kill themselves. She notes that Christianity prohibits suicide, yet there is nothing in the Bible forbidding it, and (in a far-fetched comment) suggests that Christ himself could have been said to have committed suicide, a comment she found in her research but that, like so much else in the story, she does not explain.
Reminiscing about their past, from the time she took her mentor's writing courses as a college student, she discusses his marriages, their friendship and his death. To the mix she adds quotations from literature and philosophy. Like the narrator and like Nunez, the mentor, whom we see through the narrator's eyes, was a novelist as well as a college writing professor. He told his students that whenever something bad happened to a writer, there was always a silver lining: They could write a book. (Perhaps that is the reason the narrator wrote this book.) He advised students to write what they see, not what they know. (Perhaps that is why there is an engaging visual quality to her novel.)
The mentor considered romance between professors and students vital to creative endeavors. Believing that he could not write without inspiration, he had affairs with students. He did have a brief fling with the narrator but considered it finished. The story, though, implies that she still loved him.
Numerous religious references add resonance and irony to the novel. The narrator mentions, for example, that Letters to a Young Poet, by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, appears on her syllabus. Rilke, like herself and the mentor, she adds, loved dogs. She also reads the book to her dog. She especially enjoys Rilke's line, "Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." Unfortunately, Rilke's daughter, who devoted her life to her father's work, killed herself.
The narrator also notes that a friend of Flannery O'Connor's committed suicide. The woman had become Catholic through O'Connor's influence but then left the religion. For "a serious Catholic" like O'Connor, the narrator says, "the devil is not a metaphor." A variation of this comment could serve as the book's epigraph: Neither the devil nor God is a metaphor.
Like Nunez's debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, her latest fictionalizes actual events. One of Nunez's friends did kill himself, as she noted in an interview that also suggested Nunez was affected by the growing number of suicides. (The suicide rate in the United States jumped 33 percent between 1999 and 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control).
The narrator calls this postmodern type of blended novel auto-fiction, self-fiction and reality-fiction. One of its hallmarks is a memoir-like quality, a plot that zig-zags on the road of real and invented, a tone that is conversational and a discursive style--all found in The Friend.
The book's penultimate chapter hints there are two dogs. One is the Great Dane. The other is a miniature dachshund named Jip. The second to last chapter also raises the possibility that the mentor is alive and that the suicide attempt failed. That interpretation is contradicted in the final chapter. The contradiction is not resolved, suggesting the narrator, and by extension Nunez, prefers ambiguity over definition and that ambiguity is the key to the success of this type of fiction.
Ultimately, this novel, which is fiction about nonfiction, has many layers, perhaps too many. Yet in its essence, it is a love story. "What is love...," the narrator wonders. "It's like a mystic's attempt to define faith.... It's not this, it's not that. It's like this, but it's not this. It's like that, but it's not that."
Secretly, the narrator hopes that if she takes care of the dog, her mentor will miraculously return to life, which, the alternate ending suggests, is indeed conceivable. Remembering how Edith Piaf's blindness was supposedly cured on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Therese of Lisieux, the narrator thinks everything is possible. And in this complex and compelling novel, it is.
Diane Scharper is a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Osher Institute. She is the author or editor of seven books, including Reading Lips and Other Ways to Overcome a Disability, winner of the Helen Keller Memoir Competition.
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Scharper, Diane. "Fiction About Nonfiction." America, vol. 220, no. 9, 22 Apr. 2019, pp. 46+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A584979771/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f940964. Accessed 3 July 2025.
Nunez, Sigrid WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH Riverhead (Fiction None) $26.00 9, 8 ISBN: 978-0-593-19141-5
A woman is enlisted to help a dying friend commit suicide in Nunez’s latest novel, which—true to form—is short, sharp, and quietly brutal.
Nunez returns to many of the topics she mined in The Friend, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018: the meaning of life, the nature of death, writing, the purpose of friendship. This is hardly a criticism; in fact, what else is there? The novel, spare and elegant and immediate, often feeling closer to essay than fiction, is as much about its unnamed narrator’s thoughts as the events of her life (is there a difference?). To the extent there is a “plot”—less a “plot” than “circumstances to inspire thinking”—it is this: A writer in late middle age goes to another city to visit an old friend who is sick. Later, when it becomes clear that the friend’s condition is terminal, she enlists our narrator to assist her in ending her life. Not to help with the actual dying part—“I know what to do,” she quips. “It’s not complicated”—but rather with everything that should happen in the interim. What she wants is to rent a house for the end, nothing special, “just somewhere I can be peaceful and do the last things that need to be done.” And she would like our narrator to be there. “I can’t be completely alone,” she explains. “What if something goes wrong? What if everything goes wrong?” She will, she promises “make it as much fun as possible.” Reluctantly, the narrator agrees. Most of the novel, though, is not about this, or at least not directly. Instead, the narrator considers her past and her present. She attends the doomsday climate lecture of an ex-boyfriend. She thinks about an unpleasant neighbor. She recounts, delightfully and in great detail, the plot of a murder mystery she is reading and then circles back to the trauma of aging, for everyone, and especially for women. The novel is concerned with the biggest possible questions and confronts them so bluntly it is sometimes jarring: How should we live in the face of so much suffering?
Dryly funny and deeply tender; draining and worth it.
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"Nunez, Sigrid: WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A627920121/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e64740f3. Accessed 3 July 2025.
* What Are You Going Through. By Sigrid Nunez. Sept. 2020. 224p. Riverhead, $26 (9780593191415); e-book, $13.99 (9780593191439).
The narrator of Nunez's eighth novel is out of town to see an old friend battling aggressive cancer with middling odds; in the evening, she attends a lecture on the world's bleak future, delivered by a well-informed and decidedly unoptimistic writer: her ex. Later, having stopped treatment, the friend visits the narrator in New York and, in a bar they'd frequented as young roommates, surprises her with a proposal: accompany her on a getaway during which she'll take pills to end her life. In this richly interiorized novel, following Nunez's National Book Award-winning The Friend (2018), most dialogue is volleyed without quotes, putting readers themselves in continuous conversation with the narrator. In her friend's shoes, she'd want the same thing; as herself, she's staggered by what she's agreed to bear. The friends' conversations, and their in-every-way-incomparable trip, provoke reflections on the impossible reconciliation of youth and old age, even within oneself; the inevitability that everything becomes a memory, perhaps misremembered, perhaps unbelievable. "I am talking about that taint of the surreal that besmears so much of our vision of the past." With both compassion and joy, Nunez contemplates how we survive life's certain suffering, and don't, with words and one another.--Annie Bostrom
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Bostrom, Annie. "What Are You Going Through." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 22, 1 Aug. 2020, pp. 25+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A633841848/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dd548ccc. Accessed 3 July 2025.
Byline: Merve Emre
Aging Ungracefully
Sigrid Nunez's women confront the indignities of their declining years.
Life is short, it is said, though not as short as the vast majority of novels would have us believe. Youth is the plaything of the novel-certainly of the bildungsroman, with its lost illusions and great expectations, and of the midlife novel, whose characters cast off the shackles of adulthood to claim the symbolic passions of an earlier age. Even novels about growing old look back more intently than they look down at the flesh and blood of seventy or eighty. In Saul Bellow's "Ravelstein" and Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal," the spectre of death quickens and focusses memory. It compels reminiscences, flashbacks; drives wheezy little men into the arms of younger women whose beauty and vitality they cling to like Odysseus to his rock. There such novels hang, too, amid the misty romance of the past, fearful that the red-hot glow of rapture no longer waits faithfully on the horizon. Or as a character in Sigrid Nunez's "What Are You Going Through" (Riverhead) says, "But after a certain age, that feeling-that pure bliss-doesn't happen, it can't happen."
Nunez's novel wants to be an exception that proves the rule. Its task is an unenviable one: to strip old age of whatever illusions the novel has imparted to it; to verify the truth and significance of aging and dying by turning the cool white light of Nunez's prose on every vein, every wrinkle. The plot is simple, wandering, and loosely associative: an unnamed, first-person narrator, "a female of a certain age," keeps the company of a friend who is dying of cancer. In the beginning, the friend is in the hospital in a college town. Unlike most college towns, this one is curiously devoid of anyone young. The people the narrator encounters are not merely old but aging badly, with a self-consciousness that makes them pitiful, impious, and occasionally vulgar. The host of her Airbnb is "a retired librarian, a widow," a "mother of four, the grandmother of six"; she has a fat, slack face, and is ashamed to be grieving the death of her only companion, her cat. The narrator attends a talk about environmental collapse delivered by a famous writer, a man whose arrogant features-his "stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze"-evince the look of entitlement "that comes to many older white men at a certain age." The woman who introduces his talk is a professor, also "a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp":
Someone at pains for it to be known that, although smart and well educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan. And so what if she's past a certain age. The cling of the skirt, the height of the heels, the scarlet mouth and tinted hair . . . everything says: I'm still fuckable.
"A certain age"-the phrase echoes mockingly through the early chapters of the novel, which find the narrator relaying conversations she has with other unnamed women about growing old. Irony occasionally swells into contempt, though the contempt hardly belongs to the narrator alone. Disdain for the elderly is a distinctly modern form of brutality, difficult to imagine before the nineteenth century, when great gains in life expectancy turned aging into a moral and aesthetic project. No doubt women are its primary targets. No doubt they suffer more for it. Obliged to learn the art of "aging gracefully" (the phrase appears as early as an 1894 newspaper article promising that old ladies "are a thing of the past") in a culture where productivity and reproductivity are the measure of a woman's worth, women invariably fail to do so, and either make a spectacle of their failure, like Nunez's intellectual vamp, or shrivel into invisibility. That modern societies, and Anglo-American society in particular, treat the elderly as unseemly and disposable should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the news for the past six months.
For all Nunez's knowing humor and dispassionate tone, her narrator embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life, from one another, and from themselves. The narrator's gentle disdain for her Airbnb host (who looks "like a frightened toddler," she thinks), her open hostility toward the glam academic-these reactions would have been easily comprehensible to her intellectual predecessors. Growing old, according to Simone de Beauvoir, transformed a woman into an "Other," with the same anguish and irresolution that first becoming a woman did. "As men see it, a woman's purpose in life is to be an erotic object," de Beauvoir wrote in her 1970 book, "The Coming of Age." "When she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread." Nunez's friend Susan Sontag repeated de Beauvoir's claim in her 1972 essay "The Double Standard of Aging," adding that women often internalized other people's revulsion as their own shame-a self-loathing made more unbearable for the high premium they had once placed on their youth and beauty. Nunez's first novel, "A Feather on the Breath of God," published in 1995, ends by foreshadowing this irony. That book's narrator tries to explain her sexual recklessness to an older woman, "a stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished."
Twenty-five years later, the Nunez narrator is no longer young, and her face is more ravaged than ravished. Now she wants to look at the faces of the elderly women she meets, and, setting aside both sentimentality and her contempt, try simply to listen; to pay attention; to understand what they are going through. What Nunez requires of the novel is a formal commitment to impersonality-or as close as one can get to impersonality while still writing in the first person. The narrator reveals little of her life, and rarely betrays her emotions. Her voice is calm, direct, aphoristic; at moments, humorously affectionate. She walks among other elderly women, summoning powers of concentration and perception to make their suffering coextensive with hers. "Flaubert said, To think is to suffer," she muses. "Is this the same as Aristotle's To perceive is to suffer?" Through her thoughtful gaze, the novel begins to extend its imperfect grace to all who are aging gracelessly in this modern world-which is to say, everyone.
"What Are You Going Through" takes its title from a line in Simone Weil's extraordinary essay "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God." Written in 1942, the essay traces the tender, joyful relationship between attention and grace that Nunez's novel also unfurls. Weil held that the proper aim of school studies was to learn to increase one's power of attention, so that, eventually, one could turn one's whole attention to God in prayer. Classroom exercises helped to cultivate the habit of attention, though the pure, intense, and untired attention that Weil believed brought God nearer to us did not emerge from hard work and outward ambition, from "the kind of frowning application that leads us to say with a sense of duty done: 'I have worked well!' " Attention was an effort, but it was a "negative effort." It called forth first the inherent pleasure of contemplating something external to oneself-an equation, a poem, another human being-and then the willingness to wait, neither seeking a problem nor desiring a solution but simply allowing the truth to arrive. "Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object," Weil wrote. The void created by attention would be filled by the full flow of grace: the abandonment of the self to the beauty of the surrounding world.
References to Weil's philosophy appear throughout Nunez's books, from "The Last of Her Kind" (2006) to "Sempre Susan" (2011)-a memoir of Sontag, who introduced Nunez to Weil's writing-to "The Friend" (2018). "What Are You Going Through" is the only one to elevate Weil's doctrine of attention into an organizing principle, shaping its structure, its narrative voice, and its temporality. Each conversation the narrator has is an exercise in attention: an occasion for her to shed her sense of self and to wait to receive the being she is looking at, just as she is, in all her truth. The slackness of the novel's plot and the simple, unmarked quality of Nunez's sentences are part of the narrator's self-effacement. Every trace of her particularity, of her imagination, must be vanquished. Only then can she catch and turn into words the spirit of the women she encounters. That most of these women are elderly or sick, disgruntled and often unpleasant, makes her task even harder. "The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing," Weil wrote. "The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: 'What are you going through?' It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled 'unfortunate,' but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction."
That the narrator will fail, or that she will not succeed entirely, is a given. She is not God, the only true source of grace. She cannot suffer fools gladly. But as the novel progresses she learns to fail better. The tension that animates the narrative is her transformation of the "I" into a porous figure, capable of speaking for and through others, in what becomes almost a collective expression of affliction. In the beginning, the women she meets arouse her scorn. They appear before her as types rather than as distinctive human beings: there are even two characters she calls Woman A and Woman B. At the gym the narrator attends, she examines another familiar specimen: the once beautiful woman. "In middle age she is toned but overweight, her precise features have blurred, the dazzle is gone," the narrator observes. "In the locker room she sits hunched and swathed in towels with a look of grievance on her face." Yet, as the narrator turns to another once beautiful woman, physical description and the frame of conversation begin to fall away. Now this once beautiful woman's "I" is allowed to merge with the narrator's:
I remember, the elderly and once beautiful woman said, after I reached a certain age it was like a bad dream-one of those nightmares where for some reason no one you know recognizes you anymore. . . . I'd never been in the position of having to work at making people like and admire me. Suddenly I was all shy and socially awkward. Worse, I started to feel paranoid. Had I turned into one of those pathetic people always trying to get others to like them when everyone knows that that's just the sort of person other people never do like?
Why should one heed this woman and women like her? For Weil, the highest purpose of attention and its erasure of the self was to draw closer to God. Nunez focusses her attention instead on nature-"and through her, God," Thoreau might have added. The inevitability of environmental devastation looms over the novel. Nature, too, is a once beautiful thing that time has ravaged, that men have defaced. Its decline is also characterized as a problem of attention. "People's attention remained elusive," the writer who gives a talk on climate change complains. He blames first the creative, well-educated types who embraced "personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment, a focus on the moment"; then the child bearers, eager to affirm life no matter the cost to the planet. What crisis requires is not compassion, the writer insists, but "a collective, fanatical, over-the-top obsession with impending doom."
Against such dreary prognostications, "What Are You Going Through" offers no grandiose claims about how its ethic of attention might drive collective human action. Nobody communes with giant redwood trees. No desert landscapes shimmer with an incipient consciousness. Yet Nunez has been drawn to the minds of animals since at least "Mitz" (1998), a mock biography of Virginia and Leonard Woolf's marmoset, and never more so than in "The Friend," whose plot turned on its narrator's relationship with a melancholy Great Dane named Apollo. Now she uses Weil's mysticism to model how paying attention to the dying body might train one to pay attention to the dying planet and all its suffering species. One night, the narrator speaks-or dreams that she speaks-to a kitten named Booger, adopted by her Airbnb host to replace the cat that died. Booger recalls his first home; the fire that destroyed it; the boys who found him wandering the streets, frail and hungry; the dumpster they threw him in after abusing him. "I began to cry, making my voice as big as possible, said the cat, and very big indeed it sounded to me in that void, but no one heard, no one came, and soon I had no voice left to cry." The narrator draws no distinction between how one might listen to a person and how one might listen to a cat. Why should she? The void they cry into is the same. Their need to be seen and saved is identical.
The first time I read "What Are You Going Through," I was neither impressed nor moved. Nunez seemed to be writing herself into a lineage of writers who took the power of attention to be the ethical imperative of literature. The novel nods at Virginia Woolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elizabeth Hardwick, writers whose techniques of attentiveness work, in their different ways, to dissolve interiority into exteriority, mind into world. But Nunez doesn't have Woolf's ecstatic sensuality or Bachmann's philosophical rigor or Hardwick's swashbuckling flair. The novel's spiritual imagination certainly interested me-it sent me in search of Weil's essay. But aligning the novel's aesthetics with its ethics seemed to demand too great a sacrifice on the altar of style. Frequently, my mind wandered.
Then I read the novel again. Perhaps my distraction had been a defensive pose. "Most people are in denial about aging, just as they are about dying," Nunez writes. Perhaps writing about a novel cultivates a practice of attentiveness that replaces the subjectivity of one's initial judgment with a more undesiring form of argument-and, through it, appreciation. Rereading "What Are You Going Through," I was dazed by the novel's grace: its creation of a narrative consciousness that, by emptying and extending itself to others, insured that its vitality would never dwindle, never dim. Nunez had captured what Woolf, in her exquisite story on aging, "The Lady in the Looking Glass," describes as life's "profounder state of being," "the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body." Could one fault Nunez's novel for its imperfections? For leaving its strands a little frayed and thin? "I have tried," the narrator thinks. "What does it matter if I failed."
Some might call this resignation the "wisdom of age." I find the phrase both patronizing and misguided. One does not have to live long to discover that there is no natural connection between age and wisdom; at every age, it must be attained, not assumed. Nunez's novel teaches an active concentration that intensifies as the reach of death grows; a concentration that becomes ever purer and deeper, up until the moment of death, when both attention and distraction cease. Language quiets itself, then departs, leaving us in silence. "It wasn't that we had nothing more to say to each other but rather that our need for speech kept diminishing," the narrator recalls of her dying friend. "A look, a gesture or touch-sometimes not even that much-and all was understood. The farther along she was on her journey, the less she wanted to be distracted." As the end draws near, the novel's prose grows sparser, fractured and radiant with meaning. The tense floats between past, present, and future. A sense of perpetuity is born and contemplated. "What is happening?" the narrator wonders. "This saddest time in my life that has also been one of the happiest times in my life will pass. And I'll be alone."
Alone, save for one shadowy presence-the reader. "What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about," Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay "The Storyteller." Nunez's narrator quotes Benjamin on the novel's last page, as she waits on a bench in the park outside her friend's apartment, not knowing if she is alive or dead. It is essential that the narrator must never find out when she dies; that the novel must refuse to relegate her friend's happiness or unhappiness to remembrance; that it must resist fixing the meaning of life through the definitiveness of death. The woman sitting on the park bench is not cold. What warms her is not a death she reads about but the glow from a life that persists.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
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Emre, Merve. "Aging Ungracefully." The New Yorker, vol. 96, no. 27, 14 Sept. 2020, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A636951740/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=446d5c45. Accessed 3 July 2025.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGHBy Sigrid Nunez
Reading Sigrid Nunez's absorbing new novel is somewhat akin to having a long conversation with someone who is telling you something very important, but is telling it in a very quiet voice. You have to really pay attention. Be assured, however, that the experience will be worth it. You will emerge calmer, meditative, more thoughtful, as if you have benefited from an excellent literary massage of sorts.
In ''What Are You Going Through,'' Nunez tells the simplest of stories -- about a woman accompanying a terminally ill friend through her last months -- and expands it into an exploration of the largest of themes: nothing less than the realities of living and dying in this world and how we feel about both. In the opening pages, the woman goes to visit her dying friend in the hospital and attends a talk at a local college given by a famous academic we later discover is her ex. He is the author of a viral article about the imminent apocalypse of climate change, how ''It was all over,'' that ''Our world and our civilization would not endure'' and ''We must live and die in this new knowledge.'' He goes on to say that it is useless ''to deny that suffering of immense magnitude lay ahead, or that there'd be any escaping it.'' The stoic dispassion of the speaker belies the horror of what he is foretelling, and the narrator wonders if he will offer ''a crumb, if only a crumb it be, of hope.''
This is, of course, a parallel to what the narrator's friend is experiencing as she faces the end of her life. After recovering enough to go home and plan how she wants the remainder of her life to be, she decides to end her life on her own terms. To this end, the sick friend persuades the narrator (the lack of names renders the prose plain-spoken and somehow transcendent) to be her companion on her last chapter, although she confides with an amused expression, ''I know your feelings won't be hurt when I say that you weren't my first choice.'' After the narrator agrees, the friend texts, ''I promise to make it as fun as possible,'' then sends her photos of the house she wants to rent as if they are going on vacation together.
Her sick friend is perhaps more ambivalent than she seems. Upon arriving at the rental, she bursts into tears when she realizes she has forgotten the pills back home. Later, pills safely retrieved, she curses at the narrator for daring to suggest she might harbor any doubts. They settle in to make the business of dying as pleasant as possible.
The specter of future generations hangs over all of these issues: the moral question of whether to bring children into such a bleak and foundering world. The ex (who becomes a somewhat regular confidant) posits this as a moral dilemma; he is alienated from his son by having been vocally appalled that he is choosing to have multiple children. The friend's relationship with her daughter has been fraught since birth (''I'd swear the kid was a changeling'') and they have minimal contact or warmth. And there is an odd and distinct lack of pleasure in children (''The truth is, every time I see a newborn now my heart sinks,'' the ex admits), although it's more melancholy than misanthropic.
Like the best of our writers, Nunez is a bit of a seer and a prophet (to wit: ''Salvation City,'' her 2010 novel about a flu pandemic), and so it is discomfiting to imagine that what she presents here as the state of the world could be true. It was with some relief I read these lines of beauty and hope during the friends' stay in the house: ''Golden hour, magic hour, l'heure bleue. Evenings when the beauty of the changing sky made us both go still and dreamy. Sunlight falling at an angle across the lawn so that it touched our elevated feet, then moved up our bodies like a long slow blessing.'' And then, at the end of this elegant passage: ''Infinitely rich, infinitely beautiful. Everything was going to be all right.''
As her friend moves inexorably closer to the end, they stop speaking as ''the farther along she was on her journey, the less she wanted to be distracted.'' They are now back in the friend's apartment after an accidental flood in the rental and the narrator spends her time quietly ministering to her friend's needs. During this period, the narrator vividly recalls past friends, past situations, as if vicariously experiencing the flashes of one's past life that are said to occur on the eve of death. Nunez's unerring and quietly observant eye burrows further and further into these experiences as if they will unearth an answer of sorts. And she realizes that ''this saddest time that has also been one of the happiest times of my life will pass. And I'll be alone.'' Beauty, friendship, nature, art: These are the salves to loneliness and despair, and Nunez offers them all in this searching look into life and death.
Janice Y.K. Lee is the author of ''The Piano Teacher'' and ''The Expatriates.'' WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH By Sigrid Nunez 224 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.
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Lee, Janice Y.K. "Life and Death Collide." The New York Times Book Review, 11 Oct. 2020, p. 8(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A638007081/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cb7b3165. Accessed 3 July 2025.
What Are You Going Through Sigrid Nunez Riverhead Books, 2020
In What Are You Going Through, Sigrid Nunez shares the heartbreaking faults of human communication. She demonstrates language's shortcomings and the way it allows us to share experiences yet fails to connect us deeply enough to understand another living thing completely. At the same time, she illustrates the beautiful ways that we make do, and spend lifetimes in bittersweet pursuits of personal connections that might heal our emotional and existential wounds.
Nunez deals with common human experiences such as death, illness, friendship, family, and one's relationship to the world. She often references and quotes other authors and thinkers. But despite the novel's universality and intertextuality, it is something completely new and even daring. It is a probe into the heart of human empathy and individuality. Nunez subverts structural traditions and novel conventions in service of a work that provides a fresh portrait of human relationships. She offers a rare innovation on realism, and in turn, a reading experience that is at once engaging, thought-provoking, and emotionally rich.
The novel's premise is stated at the opening and then immediately moved into the background. The narrator has taken up temporary lodgings at an Airbnb in order to visit her friend who is struggling with terminal cancer. We enter this story in medias res, with the narrator attending a talk on climate change before moving through a cast of passing characters, in order to focus on a multitude of peripheral observations and thoughtful digressions. As the narrator listens to Earth's hopeless prognosis, she details her arrival at the Airbnb, the broken promise of a cat in residence, and the quirks of her host. She stops for a drink on the way back to her room and eavesdrops on a woman talking with her father about the pain of losing her mother. The young woman is trying futilely to have her pain heard and validated. Not long after, the narrator presents a woman at her gym struggling with her aging beauty. We meet another woman who ends up being physically accosted by an old man while out for a run. Some space is allotted to a scene where her Airbnb host finally gets a cat. The narrator digresses into the feline's imagined backstory, achieving a brief but heartbreaking story arc.
The narrative's attention initially belongs to the ancillary characters and is presented with the narrator's acute attention to details, internalizing her surroundings and presenting them with her philosophical disposition. We then move into a specific area of her ailing friend's backstory: her strained relationship with her daughter. Even this section feels as though it belongs more to her friend's daughter than it does to her friend. Her daughter is difficult and resentful, a portrayal tempered by the revelation that while growing up, she'd been writing letters to her absent, and now deceased, father. In between the stories of these characters, the narrator discusses everything from sad stories to pulpy mystery novels, George Balanchine to a documentary film on prayer. Nunez provides an almost stream-of-consciousness style, if not for the fact that it is refined and that there is a thematic unification of these elements.
Where variety often risks feeling unfocused, this first section uses changing topics and a rotating cast to explore certain aspects of the human condition on a deep level. The narrator establishes her philosophy of, and affinity for, empathy. And through each moment on the page, she is inviting the reader to experiment with her values in order to actualize the full potential of the existential exploration that follows with the rest of the novel.
The main plotline is then introduced. The narrator agrees to accompany her friend to another Airbnb, this time a large colonial-style house in New England that reminds her friend of her childhood home. Her friend's condition is fatal, and she has elected to end her life on her own terms with the use of euthanasia pills at this house. At this point, we've been eased into the world of this novel, and we share the narrator's almost paradoxical perspective of both being resigned to the inevitability of mortality while being sensitive to each instance of the same's injustice. Nunez has reframed both the horror of addressing one's own mortality and the process of despairing the loss of a loved one.
There are two achievements that have allowed Nunez to accomplish this feat. One is by establishing a narrator superbly unique and round. The narrator's observations, tangents, and her highly associative memory that leads to poetic distractions, create a high-water mark of realism. She begins thinking about the song "My Favorite Things," and song lyrics are interspersed into the action. A connection between Flaubert, Aristotle, Hitchcock, and Sylvester the Cat is seamlessly made within the topic of suffering. These small choices, which often occupy such little space on the page, have grand effects. The connection between the reader and the narrator is intimate, and by proxy, so is the connection to her dying friend. We know them in away that almost transcends language and enters an arena of sublingual characterization. Nunez achieves all of this without even telling us their names.
The other aspect of the book that provides the foundation for the reader's immersion is Nunez's language. The novel is full of stunning prose. It juxtaposes the narrator's internal experience with nuanced depictions of the activity in her external world. The discourse between the two generates tension throughout the book, increasing right up until the end, with the effects remaining with the reader after the book is finished. On the sentence level, Nunez dazzles us with lines that make us laugh and which break our hearts at once. Her style is economical, and it reads effortlessly, as though we are hearing the cadence of the narrator's voice speaking to us. But there is an ever-present sense of gravitas in each line, building to moments when Nunez punctuates with profundity. Nunez writes: "But it was not his fault that our language has been hallowed out, coarsened, and bled dry, leaving us always stupid and tongue-tied before emotion."
The sentiment that language fails us, or even further serves to disconnect us, is discussed directly and with metaphor, highlighting the narrator's desire to achieve a perfected sense of empathy. The narrator thinks about the story of the Tower of Babel, and how God divides people by establishing distinct languages for each tribe. "But what if God had in fact gone even further. What if it was not just to different tribes but to each individual human being that a separate language was given, unique as fingerprints." This is the essence of the story in a way, the fact that the tools we have to communicate are learned apparatuses, and while their imperfections assure our enduring loneliness, they also define our individuality. The book seems to state that how we suffer, how we cope with despair and mortality, is how we communicate who we are in essence. The narrator notes, "You are never your true self except when you're alone--but who wants to be alone, dying?" The narrator possesses a tragic reconciliation between existentialism and identity.
As the health of the narrator's friend fails, her character is illuminated incrementally. We learn how far the narrator is willing to go in order to honor her friend's desire to author her own death, and the suspense built around whether or not the narrator's friend will choose to end her own life provides an arena for the narrator to subvert the boundaries of ethical conventions. During their time in the house, the pair becomes more candid with each other, sharing moments of tenderness that seem impossible in the book's first section. Ultimately, the narrator anticipates her friend's needs and moods. She notes that they communicate more in silence than in words, perhaps offering a tragic, yet beautiful cadential space where one may come as close as possible to knowing another person in the moments before they lose them.
John Kazanjian is a writer and book critic living in New York. His work has been published in Rain Taxi, Entropy Magazine, PANK, The Rupture, JMWW, and elsewhere. He holds a degree in English and Textual Studies from Syracuse University and is an MFA candidate at The New School in Manhattan. Currently, he is writing a novel. Find him at: www.johnkazanjian.com
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
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Kazanjian, John. "Sigrid Nunez's What Are You Going Through." The Brooklyn Rail, Feb. 2021, pp. 100+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A654197799/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a9f1496. Accessed 3 July 2025.
Nunez, Sigrid THE VULNERABLES Riverhead (Fiction None) $28.00 11, 7 ISBN: 9780593715512
In Nunez's latest, set against the early days of New York City's Covid lockdowns, a woman finds unlikely--and uneasy--companionship in a troubled college student and his parents' friends' parrot.
As in What Are You Going Through (2020) and her National Book Award-winning The Friend (2018) before that, Nunez's subject is the core business of being alive: the tenuous beauty of human connection, the nature of memory, the purpose of writing, the passage of time. All of that sounds pretentious, or precious, or both. It isn't. Instead, the result is almost arrestingly straightforward. Spare and understated and often quite funny, the experience is less like reading fiction than like eavesdropping on someone else's brain. To the extent there is a plot, though: a woman, an academic and writer--not unlike Nunez herself--old enough to qualify as "a vulnerable," agrees to spend the first days of the pandemic living in the apartment of a friend of a friend to look after their miniature macaw, Eureka, who has been abandoned by his previous collegiate bird-sitter. It doesn't spoil much to say the former bird-sitter--a handsome Gen Z vegan--soon returns without warning, and the pair (or the trio, counting the parrot) become inadvertent housemates. The evolution of those relationships, interpersonal and interspecies, becomes the scaffolding on which everything else hangs. The woman wanders the shuttered city. She has minor interactions with passing strangers, and ruminates on them. ("For the writer, obsessive rumination is a must," she thinks, in her defense.) She grapples with the meaning and purpose of the novel; she recalls a recent reunion with a tight-knit group of college friends. (It is one of those friends, in fact, who facilitates the bird-sitting gig.) "If it is true that an inability to deal with the future is a sign of mental disturbance," the woman muses, "I don't know anyone who is not now disturbed; who has not been disturbed for some time." And yet--despite the grimness of the setting--the novel itself is strangely, sweetly hopeful; there is, it seems, a reason to go on.
Sharp--and surprisingly tender.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Nunez, Sigrid: THE VULNERABLES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A762669067/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da05b501. Accessed 3 July 2025.
Sigrid Nunez The Vulnerables Riverhead Books, 2023
With her usual grace and skill, Sigrid Nunez presents a series of delicate, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, sometimes funny musings on life. There are those who will lazily call this a pandemic novel but it's so much more than that. Instead, this is a window into the life of a writer, a woman who is both one of "the vulnerables" and a force to be reckoned with. From the epigraphs to the final words of the book, Nunez's word choices are exact--illustrating both the depth of her relationship with a vast body of work and her ability to depict life.
Because many of us who experienced the pandemic in New York City have been urged to "move on," to "get back to normal," it can be possible to forget how it was. Even though the memory is, as they say, held in our blood and our bones. Trauma is like that--held in the body. And it was a terribly traumatic time, but there was also a strange beauty: empty streets and parks bursting with blossoms, random music from half-empty apartment buildings. Nunez begins her narrative with "It was an uncertain spring." It's a sentence that aptly describes March and April of 2020 and is also the first sentence of Virginia Woolf's The Years. This sentence leads Nunez, as do many of her references to others' work, to writing about writing. Here she argues against--or at least questions --the common advice to "flever open a book with the weather." And yet, she argues: Woolf, Dickens, among so many others who do. Then, repeating Woolf's line: "It was an uncertain spring," Nunez draws the reader back to the present and writes about her (or, if you prefer, her close first-person narrator's) daily pandemic practice of walking through the city. It's a tactic that moves the text from the more cerebral talk of writing to the physical action of walking, drawing us in to the experience of the "empty" city, It's also deeply compelling. There were a few of us out there walking all through that spring. Although some people were still commuting, still working, there were wide swathes of Manhattan sitting empty. Most of us who still had "office" jobs had shifted to working from home, I used lunch breaks, weekends to visit parks; a neighbor went out at five on weekdays to walk Second Avenue. And yes, as Nunez writes, there were so many flowers: "the magnolias putting out their petals ... the cherry blossoms ... daffodils ... gaudy tulips...." Nunez uses tulips to recall Sylvia Plath, Rilke, and Elizabeth Bishop. But, gracefully, she draws us back into her narrator's walks: "I went from park to park. That's where the flowers were." She begins to peel back the layers covering grief, almost sneaking up on it: "Early on, before the playgrounds were closed, I took comfort in watching the young children, or even just hearing their trilling voices as I sat on a bench nearby ... I enjoyed watching the dogs play, too, before the dog runs were closed." And we all know what's coming. What happened after.
Nunez describes her narrator's individual experience of the pandemic but there are so many points of commonality: "I had lost the ability to concentrate. It was only the news that gripped my attention, the one thing I wished I could ignore." A friend scolds her for going on long walks, telling her she's "breaking the rules, and you know it. A vulnerable, she called me. You're a vulnerable, she said. And you need to act like one." But what does it mean to act like "a vulnerable" ? While she is out walking, she's out in the world, she's alive. But the loneliness is there--as it is in so much of modern life (pandemic or no)--and she can't find relief: "during the same time I found myself unable to read, I wasn't sure whether I'd be able to write again." And though, obviously, she did begin to write again, there is at the core of the book a question that is central for so many of us: "I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life." For Nunez's narrator, this mourning is akin to the "seam of grief" felt by a man whose twin was stillborn, a feeling like "something is missing. Something has been lost." But this grief is also "at the heart of why I write." But there is humor here too--a wry dig at an editor who cut a reference to Madonna in something Nunez (her narrator?) wrote, saying "it would not be long before readers would have forgotten who Madonna was." Ha! And, this same editor condemned Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections with, "That's a terrible title. It will sell three copies." We can almost see Nunez's smile.
Moving back to a short time before lockdown, Nunez writes about a reunion of friends at the funeral for their mutual friend Lily who'd died suddenly. Along with reminiscences about Lily, there are also conversations between the friends (all women) about love, sex, marriage, gender hierarchies, grief, and literature. It's a very normal moment that lets us not only learn more about their collective pasts and friendships but also serves to contrast against the drastic changes to come. "It was the last trip I'd be taking--the last time any of us would be traveling anywhere..." and, of course, there is the realization that if Lily had died later, there would have been no reunion of friends and likely, no funeral--another part of being human that was taken away during the pandemic.
Once Nunez's narrator is back in New York City, problems arise. First, Iris, a friend of a friend, is stuck in California and needs someone to care for her parrot Eureka. Because Iris is wealthy and lives in a condo building, her neighbors "had fled, like so many other New Yorkers, to their country homes." (Note: I don't know many of those kind of New Yorkers.)
The narrator then takes us on a side path to write about pandemic birding, pandemic pet adoption, and the "solace taken from watching animal videos." As she points out, birding became so popular because it was the spring migration combined with the joy of "paying close attention to something one had always been too distracted to notice before. Something ordinary. Something beautiful." She reminds us of the national obsession with Craig Foster's My Octopus Teacher and what we can learn from being in close proximity to wild creatures. Of course, there's grief here too at how little regard so much of humanity has had for nonhumans: "Think of all the extinctions that might have been prevented, how our own species, how the whole planet might have been saved." Of course, she forgets those cultures who do value our interdependence with the Earth and all living creatures when she describes "the human drive to make the world increasingly ugly, and in the end, to trash it." Not all of us, not everywhere.
Another problem then arises: a volunteer healthcare worker has been evicted by frightened neighbors and needs a place to stay. So Nunez's narrator moves into Iris's luxury apartment full-time and the unnamed healthcare worker moves into the narrator's place. And so begins the narrator's relationship with Eureka, the little green parrot which brings her moments of joy. But the narrator also considers the contrast between the large apartment (the parrot has his own room) and so many who survive in so much less space. Then a third problem appears: the college-age son of a friend of Iris's shows up at the apartment and stays. The narrator is not pleased with the situation: "His name was an uncommon one that begins with V. I'm going to call him Vetch." Unfortunately, he would have to stay, Violet and Iris both tell her. It's hard to sympathize with her friends and their total lack of understanding. But, eventually, the narrator and Vetch reach a sort of awkward arrangement--avoiding each other, keeping different hours, and the space is large enough for this to work. Finally, they drift into something resembling friendship--encouraged by edibles and vegan ice cream.
In one of the narrator's many long walks through the city, she's accosted and spit on by the cyclist in the balaclava who used to also ride up and down Second Avenue--I assume it's the same guy. I saw him try to terrorize a woman standing at my local bus stop but a shop owner scared him off. Nunez's narrator wasn't so lucky. After the incident with the cyclist, she retreats into her borrowed bedroom. But despite Vetch being one of those "young people born to privilege, raised in privilege, and forever railing against privilege" his care for her is lifesaving. She suffers from bouts of vertigo and nausea and stops eating and so Vetch begins to give her edibles and they seem to help. The text then shifts to a consideration'of Joe Brainard's IRemember and the narrator begins her own series of vignettes starting with the repeated prompt "I remember." We learn a lot about her childhood and memories and moments that inform her writing. We also learn that she and Vetch have been "smoking weed or microdosing every day" and talking extensively about life. And then Vetch leaves, taking Eureka the parrot with him and leaving Nunez's narrator alone, happy for them both but also heartbroken.
Although not a novel in a traditional sense (what does that really mean these days?), this is a moving contemplation of lockdown, extinction, the nature of human friendship, and one writer's profound engagement with writing and the nature of hope. As Nunez's narrator riffs on Flannery O'Connor toward the end of the text: "People without hope don't write novels. I am writing a novel. Therefore I must have hope. Does that work?" Yes, I hope so. Because, really, aren't we all vulnerable?
Yvonne C. Garrett holds an MUS, an MFA-Fiction, two MAs (NYU), and a Ph.D. with a dissertation focused on women in Punk.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
http://www.brooklynrail.org
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Garrett, Yvonne C. "Sigrid Nunez's The Vulnerables." The Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 2023, p. 117. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A772963847/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b55e1a98. Accessed 3 July 2025.
The Vulnerables
by Sigrid Nunez
Virago, [pounds sterling]16.99, pp. 256
The Vulnerables represents Sigrid Nunez's foray into pandemic literature, a genre we can only expect to see grow in the coming years. The topic is handled with a level of absurdity, making elements of the story eerily (and sometimes traumatically) recognisable. Nunez's musings on how writing can represent the strangeness of life are never more poignant than when she reflects on the 'uncertain spring' of 2020. You'd think she was inventing it if you hadn't been there yourself.
The question of how to write when life is stranger than fiction is at the centre of the book. 'More and more, fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point,' she declares. 'More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, Why are you making things up?'
These ruminations on how to write the unthinkable are often profound:
The traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our
time. It may not be dead yet, but it will not long abide. No matter how
well done, it seems to lack urgency. No matter how imaginative, it
seems to lack originality.
They can also be wryly self-aware:
Whenever I write something about writing or being a writer, I am
annoying the hell out of some people.
By questioning the 'plot' of life during those 'unprecedented times', Nunez draws attention to the inevitably false constructions of any writing on the subject. Can there be a satisfactory conclusion to the pandemic? (Spoiler: no.)
The reading experience genuinely feels like being in lockdown--although one can be left questioning whether that's really a good thing--with the experience of 'pandemic brain' reflected remarkably. The vignettes of memories read like sporadic and unfocused thought, reminiscent of a waning collective attention span in a vastly contracted inner world. The unnamed narrator's lockdown walks through an empty Manhattan are echoed in the meandering, sometimes aimless prose.
There are also elements that read like a found-footage collage, an understimulated brain jumping from one activity to another without finding a satisfactory landing point. Similarly, the narrator's flung-together pandemic pod (herself, a perpetually stoned college student and a precocious parrot) is a mismatched collage, an attempt to create order out of chaos. After all, 'we were all living with the sense that, at any moment, some inexplicable new story would unfold'. Through these clever structural ploys, Nunez evokes the claustrophobic, surreal feelings of lockdown. In a sense, the impressions she creates matter more than the novel's actual plot.
This view is reflected by Nunez's comments on the very point of reading fiction:
What matters is what you experience, while reading, the states of
feeling the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather
than the fictional events described.
Nonetheless, what happens within the novel has to matter to some degree, 'otherwise how could you write a critique?' How, indeed?
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Doyle, Annie Walton. "Writing the unthinkable." Spectator, vol. 354, no. 10195, 20 Jan. 2024, pp. 40+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A781611224/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5ecff5a6. Accessed 3 July 2025.
THE VULNERABLES
SIGRID NUNEZ
256pp. Virago. 16.99 [pounds sterling].
Sigrid Nunez's breakout novel, The Friend (TLS, May 10, 2019), was a tale of new grief and a hefty dog: an 80-kilo Great Dane with paws the size of dinner plates. The hound, an unwanted inheritance, (mis)behaved like the narrator's bereaved heart: it was fretful, lumbering, insatiable. The dog was grief incarnate, a jowly, drooling colossus of loss.
Nunez's next novel, What Are You Going Through (TLS, October 2, 2020), featured a talkative cat ("a real Scheherazade"), and in her latest book, The Vulnerables, the author once again relies on a symbolic pet. This time it is a designer parrot--a macaw called Eureka--who occupies his own deluxe playroom in a Manhattan apartment. As the first wave of Covid blooms across the US our narrator is asked to care for the bird while his owners are stranded interstate. But a misunderstanding sees her share pet-sitting duties with a young stranger (whom she dubs "Vetch"). The narrator is a textbook boomer; Vetch is a Gen Z vegan. What could possibly go wrong?
Ultimately, not much. Vetch has opinions about the world he is inheriting. Our narrator--an unnamed writer--ha s opin i ons abou t Vetch ("raised in privilege, and forever railing against privilege") and his cooking (too spicy). But the two of them bond over non-dairy ice cream, get stoned and ponder life's mightiest questions ("Why is a sundae called a sundae?"). Meanwhile, Eureka defecates on the furniture and preens his clipped wings.
As lockdown metaphors go, a caged bird is as obvious as they come. It's as a marker of wealth that Eureka begins to pull his allegorical weight: he is a jungle creature condemned to spend his life staring at a jungle mural. But Nunez only flirts with class commentary here. The Vulnerables might star a penthouse parrot, but this is a bowerbird of a book: all scraps and baubles. It features half a dozen abandoned subplots; favourite quotes from favourite writers; an elaborate synopsis of a documentary about an octopus; a riff on hydrangeas.
Gone is the barbed confidence of The Friend. In its place is hesitancy, a crisis of purpose. "Images of harrowed health care workers made it hard to see inventing stories about made-up people as a heroic profession", our narrator admits. What does that mean for a jobbing novelist? If fiction is "inessential" work, what is the value, the literary imperative, of Covid-era storytelling? Our narrator has a theory: "Perhaps what is wanted in our own dark anti-truth times, with all our blatant hypocrisy and the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality, is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact".
Is The Vulnerables an object lesson or sly proof of the contrary--a metafictional wink? Grappling with that question should be this novel's great delight. But between kids these days kvetching and the hydrangeas, it all feels a bit enervated. That is the curse of Covid novels: it's difficult to capture the torpor of lockdown without succumbing to it.
Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Silcox, Beejay. "The one about the parrot: Crisis of purpose in a Manhattan flat during lockdown." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6304, 26 Jan. 2024, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784164377/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1137dd11. Accessed 3 July 2025.