Although she quickly faces eviction, the narrator cannot simply get rid of the dog. Apollo is a Great Dane weighing in at 180lbs. The narrator is a ‘cat person’, living in a tiny rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan with a no-dogs policy. When her best friend commits suicide, the unnamed narrator in Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend reluctantly takes in his beloved dog Apollo at the request of his third wife.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726).Annie Ernaux also writes a kind of auto-fiction that resonates with the fictional presence of a “real” first person.Naipaul, Bend in the River (1979), Enigma of Arrival (1987) Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (1979).Perhaps the best tag for her work is “essay novel”: that allows one to do what Javier Marias calls “literary thinking.” And there’s a wonderfully non-Pavlovian answer to the treat question: sometimes you can just have the whiskey…. But Sigrid is fascinated by establishing a reality that is entirely made-up (“not a single friend angry!”), yet also documentary in nature. The question of genre is tossed around:”fictional memoir” perhaps, which gets confused (insultingly, Tara thinks!) with auto-fiction. She thinks her upbringing with immigrant parents who felt adrift from their homeland and her own “failure” as a dancer (recounted in her 1995 debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God ) are the ferment from which her vocation as a writer arose. Because life is defined by grief and mourning, so too are my novels, says Nunez.
The conversation ranges widely and then plunges into depths. She speaks with Tara Menon, of the Harvard English department, and author of a terrific article about Sigrid Nunez in the Sewanee Review. The brilliant New York writer Sigrid Nunez‘s most recent novel is What Are You Going Through her previous one, The Friend, (2018) won the National Book Award.
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