Sigrid Nunez makes a policy of not inviting interviewers into the studio apartment on West Thirteenth Street where she has lived for decades. But during the last of our sessions, on Zoom, she picked up her laptop and danced me in a circle: bed tucked behind the sofa and book-laden coffee table under a large, cheerful geometric abstract painting on long-term loan from the artist, Dan Walsh, an ex-boyfriend; dining table bearing tulips and framed by walls of books; Singer sewing-machine desk with holes in it; hydrangeas on the book-filled sideboard, below the vista of a courtyard’s reddish fire escapes—“like Rear Window!” Nunez had just heard that the film adaptation of her best seller The Friend (2018), due to start shooting soon, might be in jeopardy after losing Bill Murray, in the wake of a public disgrace, and Naomi Watts; Nunez kept picturing the plight of the last star standing, Bing, who’d already endured years of training and several moves in preparation for his role as Apollo, the Harlequin Great Dane. Still, she has been fielding the odd factual query from one of her favorite directors, Pedro Almodóvar, for a screenplay he’s basing on her latest best-selling novel, What Are You Going Through (2020).
Our previous conversations, on a series of spring afternoons in the dim, cozy bar of a hotel a short walk away on Eighth Street, took place over a glass of wine or—on one occasion when the news cycle was particularly bleak—a vodka martini, straight up. Nunez is small, vivacious, direct but self-possessed, and as quick and light on her feet and in conversation as she is on the page. Beneath a pixie cut and circular spectacles, her delicate round face conveys a sweetness cut with something sharper, tougher—the quality that allows her, in novels, to land a lacerating joke then open an emotional trapdoor from one sentence to the next, and to make animals speak without a hint of mawkishness. When a cat tells its story in a Nunez novel, you’re made suddenly aware that such deft, respectful approximation is the closest you may get to any other mind; you feel discomfort only at how many sentient, suffering creatures you habitually ignore. Alongside teaching and working on a new book, she’d been relaxing by rereading Proust in French—one clear influence on her taste for the essayistic digressiveness Javier Marías has called “literary thinking”—and going over a new German translation of her first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), which includes elements of her own biography.
The child of first-generation immigrants—her mother was a German war bride; her Chinese Panamanian father washed dishes in a hospital and waited tables on weekends—Nunez was born the youngest of three sisters in 1951, grew up in the Staten Island projects, and in the seventies became part of a circle that had formed around The New York Review of Books. Though she has been winning honors for writing since sixth grade—they include a Whiting, a Guggenheim, a Rome Prize, and a National Book Award for The Friend—she was in her late thirties by the time she began to publish, and found fame three decades after that. As well as short stories, essays, and a remembrance of Susan Sontag, Sempre Susan (2011), she is the author of eight novels, including Naked Sleeper (1996), Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998), For Rouenna (2001), The Last of Her Kind (2006), and Salvation City (2010). She favors spare prose, and yet her fictions are richly woven, often playful texts, filled with echoes and aphorisms. I’d noticed that when the narrator of What Are You Going Through recounts the plot of a delightful-sounding noir she’s reading—about a young serial killer obsessed with John Travolta—the first part sounds identical to Nunez’s “The Plan,” which had been chosen for the 2019 Best American Short Stories. When I asked what metafictional game was afoot, Nunez corrected me: needing another ingredient “for contrast” in her literary novel, she’d decided to repurpose the story line of “Killer on the Floor,” a thriller she’d written a few years earlier but couldn’t sell—she would have felt too guilty about giving away the ending of someone else’s book. (Never one to waste good material, she also got the opening section published as “The Plan.”) Of the fictitious blurb she bestows on her unsung noir, likening it to the work of Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon, Nunez chuckled: “See, you shouldn’t have rejected it, you fools!”
—Lidija Haas
INTERVIEWER
How’s the new novel going?
SIGRID NUNEZ
It had been going well, but I’ve been attempting to move on from page 129 to page 130 for the past four days and it’s just not working. I’ve tried to tell myself to leave a hole there and focus on some other part of the novel that will belong a little further down the line, and you’d think that would be possible, because this book is, to some extent, collage-like, very similar in structure to The Friend and What Are You Going Through—it’s not a mystery novel, where you’d be afraid to write out of order, because of the sequence of clues—but it feels all wrong to jump ahead.
INTERVIEWER
Do you always write in this linear way?
NUNEZ
Every single book I’ve written by putting one foot in front of the other. Renata Adler once said that there was a point when she was writing and she had covered the entire floor
