Sigrid Nunez

JZ

I wanted to ask you about your time at Barnard. Looking back on it now, and as a teacher yourself, how do you feel about that period in your life?

SN

I was there at that chaotic time from 1968 to ’72, a time of ongoing protest marches, shutdowns, and demonstrations, mainly for equal rights and against the Vietnam War. It was also a time when all kinds of rules were being broken. Before I got to Barnard there was a nightly curfew, but within just a few weeks of my arrival they got rid of that. I was shocked to discover that you could cut classes regularly and have nothing happen to you. There was one course where I never laid eyes on the professor until the midterm. I had never been away from home before—I grew up on Staten Island but I didn’t commute to Barnard, I lived in a dorm—and the whole college experience was overwhelming to me. I put a lot of memories of those days into my novel, The Last of Her Kind. It wasn’t until junior year that I pulled it together, and then I got quite serious about my courses. I’ve been back to Barnard to teach a workshop and I’ve taught in many other schools, and I can’t imagine not caring about attendance and punctuality and handing in assignments when due. This has made more than one person who knew me back then say, “You’re such a hypocrite!” Perhaps. But the truth is, over the years I have sometimes felt a certain resentment about that time. I was 17. Someone should have cared a little more about how I was doing. But of course the administration was responding to demands from the students themselves. On campuses all over the world they were demanding that schools drop their in loco parentis role.

JZ

That very much comes across in The Last of Her Kind. You feel that there is no safety net for these kids. They got what they asked for in terms of freedom, but…

SN

The schools should have known better. [Laughs.] What were they doing, listening to us kids?

JZ

What made you pivot into a more serious, studious mode in your junior year?

SN

I was two years older, and more mature, and in fact I had always loved being a student. There were these wonderful professors and extremely smart students, and they inspired me. And I had a focus. I was an English major, and I didn’t think, “What am I going to do when I get out of here?” I knew that I wanted to be a writer.

JZ

I wanted to ask about Ann in The Last of Her Kind. Was there somebody from Barnard who inspired her? Or was she more of a composite or a figure of the political moment?

SN

I didn’t base Ann or any other character in the book on anyone I knew in real life. But there were many people like Ann on campuses all over the country at that time. Most of them changed, or at least blurred, their radical beliefs sometime after graduation. I wanted to write about someone who did not, who kept the same politics and ideals her entire life, and that was Ann Drayton.

JZ

That book is an amazing example of what exactly happens when you take those beliefs all the way to their conclusion. She becomes a saint figure, a martyr.

SN

The word martyr today has a negative connotation, suggesting the person so called isn’t sincere. But Ann is in fact always utterly sincere, and I do feel there’s something heroic about her life, in particular the part that she spends in prison. It’s there that she gets to do the kind of self-effacing good work that she was born to do. On the other hand, there’s no doubt she’s the kind of person who’d be impossible to live with.

JZ

The irony is that everybody hates her despite all the good she’s constantly trying to do.

SN

Well, she does a lot of stupid things. For example, in the dining room at Barnard there’s a table set aside for members of BOSS—the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters. That table got started back when I was a student. In my novel I have Ann decide to sit there. No one mistreats her, no one asks her to get lost, they just all ignore her. She doesn’t make the same mistake again, but she does say she’s glad she did it, because now she knows what it’s like to be excluded. Her worst mistake of all, of course, is shooting someone to death, but she defends that act too, and she never apologizes for it.

JZ

When you’re conceiving of a new novel, do you tend to start with character? How does it typically begin for you?

SN

It usually begins with something very small. For example, the beginning of What Are You Going Through: I was at a residency in California, and I was taking a walk when this sentence came to me: “I went to hear a man give a talk.” Already right there I had two characters. Who’s this “I”? Who’s giving this talk? And then, when and where is all this happening? And from there I started spinning a story. The second most important character in that book after the narrator, the friend with terminal cancer, didn’t come into the story until much later. I once had a student who was a very good writer, but he was having a lot of trouble telling his story. I knew that he had a three-year-old son and that he must have told him bedtime stories. And I said, “Think, how does that work? You start the story, and the child says, ‘And then what happened? And then? And then?’” I tried to get the student to think of writing his own story that way. And that really is the way I work when I’m writing. I don’t need some big idea before I begin. I put something down and I ask myself, okay, now, what next?

JZ

So you studied English, and then you pursued your MFA—what was your first job after the graduate school?

SN

I was an editorial assistant at the The New York Review of Books, where I’d worked after graduating from Barnard as well. It didn’t pay a lot, but you could get by on a small income in those days. While I was at Columbia getting the MFA, I lived off a small loan and some part-time work, mostly tutoring. Needless to say, to survive as an aspiring young writer in Manhattan today is infinitely more challenging and, for many, downright impossible.

JZ

And that all preceded working with Susan Sontag?

SN

I only worked for Susan for about twelve hours total. I had finished the MFA, and I was supporting myself with various part-time jobs. Around this time Susan was recovering from breast cancer surgery and she wanted help getting through a big pile of correspondence that she’d had to ignore. She asked her friends at the New York Review if they knew someone who could come type while she dictated, and right away they thought of me because I lived about two blocks from where she did on the Upper West Side. I met her son, who shared the apartment with Susan, and we started dating, and soon after that I moved in with them. Sempre Susan, my memoir about that time, is my only nonfiction book, the only book I’ve written in which I didn’t stretch the truth in any way or invent a thing. Although I enjoy writing nonfiction, I find that what I always really want to be doing is making things up. I’d rather be using my imagination than searching my memory.

JZ

How do you feel about review writing?

SN

I don’t ever want to review a book that I know I won’t like, and in fact I’ve been very enthusiastic about most of the books I’ve reviewed. I prefer writing longer pieces, four to five thousand words. I like the challenge of figuring out how to let the reader know what a book is about without giving everything away, and whether or not they’re likely to want to read it.

JZ

You’re ultimately providing a service.

SN

Right. It takes discipline to push against any narcissistic impulse, and to refrain from being too performative. I like what W.H. Auden said, that it’s hard to write a negative review without showing off. Even if you end up criticizing a book, you have to stop yourself from appearing to relish it, from showing off.

JZ

You kind of want to become a cipher. You have to remain invisible to a degree.

SN

I think it’s mainly a question of keeping the review about the book and not about yourself. And avoiding talking about the book you think the writer should have written instead of the one they did.

JZ

It’s funny, Georgette in The Last of Her Kind marries a book critic who’s all about excoriating work in the public forum, showing off in every review with these relentless takedowns.

SN

Exactly. One of those cruel, oh-so-clever critics who likes to entertain the reader at the writer’s expense. There’s a certain type of pan that I call a Die, Author, Die review. It’s different if the critic is taking on a writer with a big reputation whose work the critic sincerely believes is automatically praised, even overpraised, every time. That writer can afford to be taken down a peg or two, and that can be a service. But I don’t think that’s the way to approach an unknown writer’s debut.

JZ

That is the most devastating, when somebody just eviscerates a debut—that’s the writer’s first outing, and they’ll always have that review with them. I was thinking of that cipher quality a little bit in terms of some of your narrators, that obfuscation or muted quality. I also see that a little bit in For Rouenna. Is that a conscious choice you make with these deeply watchful, observant narrators?

SN

I don’t know exactly where that quality came from but it’s already there, in my first book, A Feather on the Breath of God. I began with the sentence “The first time I ever heard my father speak Chinese was at Coney Island.” Which was true. And I went on writing all about my father. And when I finished, I realized that I wanted to go on and write about my mother. Those two parts of the book were published in journals, and I remember some people at the time said, “There’s not enough of the narrator. She’s writing about this mother and father, but where is she?” And I found this to be a very bad criticism, because in fact the narrator is all through both those narratives. But I do like the idea of a narrator focusing intently not on herself but on another character and exploring that character’s life. For Rouenna was partly influenced by the work of W.G. Sebald, in particular his novel The Emigrants. It came very naturally to me to imagine a narrative in a similar form. I wanted to write about the experience of being a nurse during the war in Vietnam, and I knew it would have been impossible for me to do it in a traditional novel. And in a lot of my other work, you have a narrator—always a reliable one, by the way—who positions herself as a kind of outsider who takes it upon herself to tell other people’s stories, which, however, always ends up to be stories about herself as well.

JZ

The narrator is writing by or through living, which is so appealing as the reader as well. There’s this sense of a gathering of experiences, tidbits of speech, little observations—it often reads as though the narrator is writing and recording as they walk through their own lives.

SN

I see it also as a way for me to blend fiction and nonfiction, which works well for the kind of stories I want to write. Several of my books are hybrid works, mostly fiction but also part essay. I could never have been a journalist. I’m much too error prone, for one thing. To be honest, I often have trouble keeping facts straight. But in some of my work I have felt like I was writing journalism, and I’ve found it very satisfying. It’s like I’ve found a way to play the journalist without having to obey the strict rules. [Laughs.] In The Vulnerables, though, my narrator is less of an observant outsider than in earlier work. There is more focus on herself than there is on the other main character.

JZ

It’s as if you’re reading a character’s notes and thoughts for a memoir, which I love because it brings so many different perspectives and angles in. Tonally, what did you discover as you finished this latest book?

SN

Without my intending it, I seem to have created a trilogy, beginning with The Friend. Next came What Are You Going Through, which turned out to be a book very much in conversation with The Friend. The Vulnerables completes the trilogy. All three books can be said to share a narrator. The way she thinks and the way she behaves in each book is exactly how the narrator in each previous book would have done. Also, they are written in the same style, and they have the same tone. And then there are the animals. There was a big part for a dog in The Friend, then a small part for a cat in What Are You Going Through, and now a very small part for a parrot in The Vulnerables.

JZ

Does it feel satisfying to have completed this trilogy? Do you want to pursue something very different moving forward?

SN

I can’t imagine writing another novel that would turn the trilogy into a tetralogy. I really do feel I came to the end of something with The Vulnerables. If I want to write another novel, it’s going to have to be different. On the other hand, I think it’s true what they say, that a writer has only two or three ideas and they just keep writing the same thing over and over. There may be no escaping that, but I don’t want to repeat what I’ve already written in these three books about being a woman and a writer and a teacher of writing and literature.

JZ

I was wondering about Salvation City, which has a very different young male narrator. What was it like for you to enter that frame of mind?

SN

I’d always centered my fiction around a female protagonist and for a change I wanted to write about a male character. I wasn’t sure how convincing I could be writing about a man, but I had confidence in my ability to make my main character a boy. And I did not make him the narrator; that book was written in the third person. It had been on my mind that, probably within my lifetime, there was going to be a pandemic. I knew that the Great Flu of 1918 had orphaned many children—the writer Mary McCarthy among them. Another writer, William Maxwell, never got over losing his mother to that flu; I think he was about ten at the time. I wanted to imagine what that might be like, losing your parents after being deathly ill yourself, and also what a pandemic would be like if it struck in our polarized times, amid so much governmental dysfunction. Mostly, though, I just wanted to write about about a young person—a boy.

JZ

Does having other faculty and students around motivate you to a certain degree? Do you think it helps?

SN

Unlike most writers I know, I started teaching late—I was already 40—and I have never applied for a permanent teaching job. Instead, I’ve taught on and off at many different places: Columbia, NYU, Amherst, Smith, Princeton, the New School, Irvine, Hunter, Boston University, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some. And I’ve taught also at Bread Loaf and several other writers’ conferences. In this way I’ve managed to keep the kind of flexibility and freedom other teachers don’t have, and I’ve been spared the kind of time-consuming committee work and other obligations that are part of being a full-time academic. I was able to do this, of course, because I didn’t have huge debts or a family to support. I did have to pay for my own health insurance, though, which over the years grew into a staggeringly high bill. As for the teaching itself, it depends on the students, but I’ve always had some, in every class, whom it’s been a privilege to teach. And I think the teaching can feed a writer’s own work. Because in a workshop what you’re doing is close-reading pages and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t work what can be done to make it work. And in that process, you’re learning things about writing that are likely to be helpful in your own work. The more you teach writing, the better you understand how a writer’s mind works—and that includes the various mistakes that most writers seem prone to, at least early on. And you learn how to see when something isn’t working before you’ve gone too far down that wrong path. You think, uh-oh, I’ve seen this before—I’m introducing too many characters too fast, say, which is something you see in workshop stories all the time—I need to fix this before I go on.

JZ

And with teaching you have a predetermined schedule and structure.

SN

I found it workable even during the semester that I was teaching four courses in four different schools in three different states, because each of those courses met only once a week. But if I had to teach three courses a semester every year as well as show up at department meetings and do all the required committee work, well, I don’t know how much of a writing life I’d have been able to have then.

JZ

What are some of the most important mistakes for a student that you’ve identified as a teacher?

SN

Timidity, for one big thing. There are a lot of places a student writer desperately wants to go but is afraid to. You have to learn not to worry about what people are going to think of you personally. But as one of my MFA students once said, “It’s true that we now feel that, as writers, we need to put our best foot forward.” But what Rachel Cusk and others have said is also true: wanting the reader to like you corrupts the writing. Another big mistake—and one I myself made as a beginning writer—is being too explicit, telling the reader things they already know or can figure out for themselves. And also, failing to understand that just because something happened in real life doesn’t mean that you can merely report it, just as it happened, without first shaping it into effective fiction.

JZ

Who do you think of as your contemporaries, the people whose work you’re often looking at? Who is particularly inspiring to you?

SN

Anything I read that’s good can be an inspiration to me. Two writers whose work I’ve found inspiring over many years are J.M. Coetzee and Lydia Davis—but there have been countless others. And different books of mine have been influenced by different writers. I wrote some parts of The Last of Her Kind under the influence of Margaret Atwood, but Philip Roth’s American Pastoral was an even bigger influence. I’ve mentioned Sebald, and of course there’s Susan Sontag, and also my former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick, whose novel Sleepless Nights was a major influence on my own first novel. And though I almost forgot this, I remember writing my second novel, Naked Sleeper, with the thought in mind that I wanted it to be like an Anita Brookner novel. And I was thrilled when at least one reviewer saw the connection.

JZ

I don’t think people talk about her enough. Her novels are incredible.

SN

She wrote about twenty-five novels, I think, as well as some art history books. Around the time I was writing Naked Sleeper, which came out in 1996, she was very popular, and very prolific, with a new novel coming out about once a year, and I kept devouring them. Then at some point she announced that she wasn’t going to write any more novels—this was well before she died in 2016—though I seem to recall she did write more. I wanted to write a novel like one of hers, a character study of a certain kind of ordinary but troubled middle-aged woman who finds herself in an inappropriate romantic situation. I admired her beautiful, elegant style above all, and I found reading her work to be not just engaging but incredibly soothing.

JZ

Soothing is an excellent word for it. I remember reading Hotel du Lac and I was floored by it. It’s so beautiful. These characters—the mother and the daughter, this narrator who very much wants to be in the thick of it but doesn’t quite know how. Her traumas are revealed in such a subtle way.

SN

She is indeed a subtle writer and her prose has a wonderful clarity. She’s the kind of writer you want to read when you feel your own prose is getting too murky or pretentious.

JZ

You briefly mentioned Susan Sontag; how have your ideas about her work changed over time?

SN

I never liked her early fiction, and in later life when she looked back on it, she said she didn’t think the early work was good either. But then she wrote her epic historical novel, The Volcano Lover, which came out in 1992, and I loved that. One early story that I liked a lot was in a form that we’d now call autofiction. And then she wrote several more like that—including one that became very famous after it appeared in The New Yorker, “The Way We Live Now.” It was about AIDS, a young man dying of AIDS, and I remember how many readers felt that it really caught what it was like to be living through that horrific time. I recently read the new collection of her writings about women and feminism, On Women, and I found a lot of her ideas and broad generalizations about women baffling. She was a feminist, but she clearly didn’t really like women, and she put much of the blame for their oppression on women themselves. She is explicit about seeing herself as an exception, a woman who possessed the qualities to make her equal to a man. The first time she was invited to a dinner at the home of her publisher, Roger Straus, she was shocked to see that, at the end of the meal, the men repaired to one room for cigars and the women were asked to repair to another. Such was the custom chez Straus. But Susan refused to go with the women and went to join the men. And that was the end of that custom. Roger Straus’s wife Dorothea loved to tell this story about this truly bold thing that Susan did. But consider what she did not do.

JZ

She didn’t invite the other women in with her.

SN

And she never would have done that. She would never have gone to the women first and said, Sisters, this is absurd. Let’s all end this nonsense together. In fact, she blamed them for allowing themselves to be treated like that. And obviously she felt that being with the men was the better place to be. Me, frankly, I would have preferred to hang out with the women.

JZ

It’s a perfect example of the contentions around her. Is there a direction you’re curious about exploring in your next project, even if it makes you nervous?

SN

I really don’t know, but at this point in my life I have real regrets about all the different kinds of writing I might have done that I simply had no time for. I mean, I would have loved to try my hand at a completely different prose style, something more elaborate, say, or experimental. And as a huge lover of Dickens, I’ve always fantasized about writing some expansive and densely descriptive novel with a large cast of characters and a suspenseful, complicated plot. I wish I could have written some children’s literature, and more nonfiction as well, more literary criticism, more memoir, and so on.

JZ

Is there genre fiction that you find yourself drawn to?

SN

I was once asked by a children’s book editor if I’d like to try writing a children’s book and I decided to write about Mitz, a pet marmoset that belonged to Virginia and Leonard Woolf. I wrote three little opening chapters and sent them to the editor and never heard back. I persisted, and finally she responded rather bad-temperedly that one can’t write a children’s book that doesn’t have a child in it. Much later, when my agent and my editor heard about that idea and read the chapters, they persuaded me to finish the book, only they thought it should be a book for adults, or as they put it “for children of all ages.” At first, I didn’t think I could do it, but then I thought of Flush, Virginia Woolf’s brilliant mock biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, and that inspired me, and so I wrote Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. My next attempt at writing in a different genre was a noir. That was what I was working on before I started The Friend. I finished it but I couldn’t sell it. Even people who liked it didn’t think it had a future. I heard things like, “It’s so different from all your other work,” and “It’s not a Sigrid Nunez novel.” I even thought about trying to publish it under a different name, but in the end, I dropped it and moved on. And then I all but forgot about it, until I needed excerpts from some crime novel to use in What Are You Going Through. So at least part of it ended up published after all. But of course, now I can’t ever publish the book itself, because in What Are You Going Through I give the whole plot away. [Laughs.]

JZ

[Laughs.] You cannibalized it.

SN

Yes. But I could hardly have used excerpts from someone else’s crime novel, could I.

JZ

I love the nesting of the narratives.

SN

A long time ago, back in the ’80s, I published a short story in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and that’s what made me think maybe I had it in me to write a crime novel. It was a story I titled “Time,” which they changed to “Henry Renson’s Fortune.” I didn’t care for their title, but I was pretty excited to see it in a place where so many famous mystery writers have been published.

JZ

So when you wrote the mystery novel, there was something circular there. In that vein, do you think there has been a uniting force across all of your fiction?

SN

There are recurrent themes. Loss, for one thing. How much a part various losses play in our lives, including the inevitable losses that come with time passing. In The Vulnerables, the narrator talks about graduating from sixth grade, how tremendously excited she is about going to junior high, but she also feels a deep pang: she’ll never see elementary school again! I remember feeling that way as a child. Young as I was, I had a powerful sense of nostalgia. I was always keenly aware of time passing and how you can never turn back the clock. Life rushes on, and so many things get lost along the way, including people whom you love and who are deeply important to you. Girlhood and womanhood have also been major subjects in my work, and the nature of friendship, female friendship in particular. Then of course there’s the life of the artist and what it means to be a writer. And my most recent books have a lot to say about aging and dying.

JZ

Your novels have a great deal of humor and levity as well.

SN

How could they not? People are funny, as we all know, and the world is full of amusing stuff. Go sit in a busy park for a half hour and for sure you’ll see at least one amusing thing, if only how much some dog owner resembles his dog. Comedy is a big part of human life, and if a book doesn’t include some humor, I feel the writer has left something essential out. And one thing I’ve discovered about aging that I would never have thought before: it’s not boring. When you’re young you might think that’s how it must be, but as it turns out, being old is anything but boring.