Sigrid Nunez

A resonant, powerful, and unconventional novel, which barely possesses a plot. The writing is clean and unpretentious. Nunez writes about difficult truths and one of the most difficult experiences: accompanying a dying person. There really are times when nothing we can say or nothing others can say to us can make a situation better. I found this an intense reading experience, and, short as the book is, I was relieved to reach the end. The reader is committed to and endures the experience, show more much as the narrator does.

A couple of quotations from the novel:

“We talk glibly about finding the right words, but about the most important things, those words we never find. We put the words down as they must be put down, one after the other, but that is not life, that is not death, one word after the other, no, that is not right at all. No matter how hard we try to put the most important things into words, it is always like toe-dancing in clogs.”

“how hard it was for people to accept reality” show less

What You Are Going Through, published in 2020, is a meandering account of an unnamed narrator who is helping to negotiate the final months of a close friend debating when to take her own life as she copes with a terminal cancer diagnosis. As the narrator learns in the weeks that follow, dying is like “toe-dancing in clogs.” Her account highlights the importance of empathy, the cost of friendship, and the entwined moments of happy recollections and the daily indignities that disease show more brings.

While the topic may seem a grim one, I never found it so in this book. Instead, it shows how we continue to appreciate the gifts life brings us, even with diminished returns. Woven into the plot are the narrator’s interactions with the life stories of people she encounters daily, be it an ex-husband giving a lecture about the fact that climate change has doomed the generations that will follow us, or her absorbing accounts of a neighbor’s coping with failing mental capabilities. It is a story that highlights the importance of interaction with “ships that pass us in the night,” no matter how brief the encounters.

Throughout the novel, the narrator grudgingly gives up personal details of her own life. By the end of the story, the bits and pieces she provides fuse into a picture of someone whom the reader understands and sympathizes with. In reading Nunez’s book, I was reminded of Rachel Cusk’s “Outline Trilogy,” which explored a similar format of story telling. That trilogy wowed me, and this book proved just as compelling a read. While one might expect What You Are Going Through to be a depressing undertaking, it proves in fact to be a discourse on the insistence of life, even when the odds are heavily weighed against it. show less

A talented writer's first-person narrative, where the author, Sigrid Nunez, explores her immigrant parents and the impact family relationships have had on her own life.

Employing a distinctive, stream-of-consciousness style, Nunez shares sometimes random memories which, when taken together, paint rich, multi-dimensional images of her parents. They are both remote, complex, and struggling to fit into an America which does meet their expectations. And they are fundamentally mismatched.

Her show more Chinese-Panamanian father works so many hours, in low-paying jobs, that he barely has time for ANY relationship with his wife and children. Her stay-at-home mother, a German immigrant, is deeply unhappy and longs to return to her homeland, complaining to her family all the time. Neither parent loves the other and their fights provide a continuous soundtrack to the lives of their young daughters.

As a teen, the narrator eventually finds some satisfactory escape and identity in studying ballet -- in appreciating its beauty, recognizing its inherent sexism, and through exposure to fellow students from more privileged backgrounds. Though determined not to marry, the author also describes an intense, long-term affair with a Russian immigrant -- one whose personal values and experiences differ so completely from her own.

However, while the four portraits Nunez creates (father, mother, self, lover) are vibrant and complex, there is little story to this narrative. It feels much more like the author's recollections of episodes in her life. No one comes off as particularly admirable. The ending did not provide much resolution. Instead, it felt to me like A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD is a young writer's attempting to understand her parents' immigrant experience and the ways it damaged her. show less

The title is a double entendre -- is "the friend" the longtime close acquaintance of the narrator, or is it that acquaintance's great dane, who is left behind after the man's death and given over to the narrator. Though the narrator is hesitant to take up the task of dog ownership, she quickly falls in love with the aging beast.

The book is perhaps less a novel than it is a journal-cum-essay. About a third of the book consists of relevant quotes and anecdotes from other authors. "The Friend" show more is the closest that most of us will ever get to having a drink with a learned sage who has spent much of her life absorbing the wisdom of the written word. There is perhaps more wisdom in these 212 pages than in any other book I've read in the past ten years. I long for such depth of conversation with another human in the real world.

Though "The Friend" is an act of mourning for a lost friend (and the eventual loss of another), it is also quite funny. As the narrator quips, "it's because a person has a sense of humor that we feel we can trust them."

Now that I have finished reading this book, I can't help but feel that I have entered into a state of mourning myself. show less