Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City and remains a New Yorker to this day. She has published nine novels, including The Friend, What Are You Going Through, The Vulnerables, A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna, and Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, about Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s pet marmoset. Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag chronicles a period in the 1970s when Nunez shared an apartment with Sontag and her son, David Rieff, who was Nunez’s partner at the time.
Nunez has received numerous awards for her writing, including a Whiting Award, Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. The Friend won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018, and a film version starring Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, and a Great Dane named Bing was released in 2024. The Room Next Door, a film version of What Are You Going Through starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, also came out in 2024. Nunez’s short story collection, It Will Come Back to You, will be released later this month, on July 14, 2026.
In the summer of 2024, I picked up The Friend and could not put it down. The book’s narrator, a writer, unexpectedly becomes the caretaker of a grieving Great Dane named Apollo after the dog’s owner, her mentor and dear friend, dies by suicide. I’ve recommended The Friend many times since then, and when people ask me what it’s about, I usually say something like, “It’s about a dog,” which is true, but also an oversimplification. The Friend is about a dog, yes, but also about friendship, grief, love, and the nature of fiction, to name just a few of its threads.
On November 17, 2025, Nunez visited Butler University as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series, and we spoke about writing, reading, art, and of course, animals. At the time, one of my dogs, George, a nearly 15-year-old rescued Shetland Sheepdog/Labrador mix, was struggling with mobility and other age-related health issues. Despite his failing health, he was still enjoying life, so I had no way of knowing that I’d lose him to pneumonia just days later, on November 23, 2025. As I grieved my goofy, loving Georgie Boy, the final lines of The Friend became his epitaph:
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!
Jenny Schuster (JS): What draws you to write about animals?
Sigrid Nunez (SN): Well, first of all, let me say that, although I’ve always loved animals, I didn’t actually plan to write about them—at least, not as an adult. I was the kid in grade school who was known as “the one who loves animals,” even though most kids do. But I guess I was a bit more extreme. In the housing project where I grew up, you were not allowed to have pets—though my family did sneak in a cat—which probably made my passion for animals more intense. The stories I wrote for school were almost always about animals, including magical ones that could talk.
But, as an adult, it didn’t occur to me to write about animals, because writers for adults almost never do that. I think they’re afraid that it’s going to look like the story is intended for children, or that it’s going to be too sentimental. But then, sometime in the mid ’90s, a children’s book editor wrote me and asked, “Have you ever considered writing a children’s book?” She had read some of my work somewhere and she said she thought I’d be good at that. I don’t know what she read, but at the time, my first novel had come out, and my second one was in production. At first I said no, but later an idea came to me. I happened to know that Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, had a pet marmoset called Mitz—the kind of tiny monkey that fits in the palm of your hand. She’s mentioned often enough in each of their letters and journals that I thought I could write a little book about her life with them. I imagined it as both an animal adventure story and an introduction to Bloomsbury for young readers.
So I wrote the first three chapters, and I was excited about them. I sent them to the editor and months went by with no response. Finally, I wrote to her, and she wrote back a very terse, irritated-sounding reply: “You can’t write a children’s book that doesn’t have any children in it.” Which isn’t really true. Remember 101 Dalmatians?
JS: Yes, exactly! There are no children in that book.
SN: But my book was clearly very much not what she was looking for. Then, sometime later, I told this story to another writer who was represented by the same agent that I had at the time, and shortly after, my agent called me and said, “I hear you’ve written a children’s book.” When I’d explained, she asked me to send her the three chapters, which she then sent to my editor at HarperCollins. He liked the chapters and wanted to acquire the book, but he said that the team there did not want Mitz’s story to be a children’s book but rather “a children’s book for all ages.” “What does that mean?” I wondered. And then I remembered Virginia Woolf’s novel Flush, her mock biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. That book—a very beautiful book—had been written for adult readers. So I thought, “It can be done.” Virginia loved and was fascinated by animals—especially dogs—and she was a sharp observer of animal behavior. But Mitz was really Leonard’s pet. In fact, he turned out to be a kind of marmoset whisperer.
JS: (Laughs.)
SN: The Woolfs had two cocker spaniels, Pinka and Sally, during the time they had Mitz, and so I got to write about them too. And I really enjoyed writing about those animals, but I had no plans to write about one again. The Friend did not start out as a novel with a Great Dane as an important character. But around page 30, I’d set up a situation in which the widow of the man who’s taken his own life says to the narrator, his longtime friend, “Would you come to my house? I have something I want to ask you.” And then I thought, “Well, what is she going to ask her?” I had to come up with something, and that’s when I thought, I could put a dog in the story. And as I kept writing, the dog became more and more of a character, and it gave me enormous pleasure to write about him. And when the book came out, it seemed everyone was happy to read about the dog, which frankly surprised me.
When I started my next book, What Are You Going Through, I had no intention of writing about an animal. But it happened that, at one point in the story, a cat jumps onto the bed where the narrator is just about to fall asleep, and the cat, like several characters in the novel, starts telling a story about his life. I blur what’s actually happening so the reader has to decide: was this really a talking cat or just a dream the woman has that night? I wasn’t sure this scene worked, and I thought, if the editor says something like, “I don’t think we need it,” I can cut it without the rest of the novel being affected. Instead, what does the editor say? “I love the cat!”
And even though we’re talking about a tiny part of the book, a mere eight pages, once the book was published, people kept bringing up the cat. It seemed everyone loved the cat. And then I realized that people really like reading about animals and having animal characters be part of the story. So when I wrote my next novel, The Vulnerables, from day one I knew I wanted to include an animal, and I thought, this time I’ll make it a bird.
That’s how all the animals got into my work, and I regret that I didn’t think about writing about animals much earlier because I found it really satisfying, and now I know how well readers respond to it. I won’t do it again, though. (Laughs.)
JS: (Laughs.) You may not plan to do it again, at least for now.
SN: I may not plan to do it again.
JS: If an animal appears—
SN: That’s true. That could happen.
JS: One thing that stood out to me about Eureka in The Vulnerables was the description of the screaming. Everybody has this vision of macaws, like, they talk. But when they start to scream, I don’t know how you could live like this.
SN: And your neighbors! There used to be an exotic bird store on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. I lived nearby, and I went in there often, and all this noise was always happening. When I brought other people there, they’d say, “I can’t stand it.” They had to leave and wait for me outside. I also had a friend who lived in Rome, and one of his neighbors had parrots. We’d talking on the phone, and I could hear that the man had his windows open.
While reading about parrots, I discovered that it generally means they’re in distress when they scream, but I don’t think all these pet macaws are necessarily in distress. Even the ordinary noise they make can be pretty loud.
JS: In The Vulnerables, you write about the idea that their lifespans are so long that people have to consider what will happen to them when they’re gone.
SN: Let alone the tortoise!
JS: Yes! They can live until they’re 80. And I was kind of astonished by that, even though I would love my dogs to live as long as I could.
SN: Yes, that would be wonderful, if dogs could do that. One of my favorite quotes is: “Life: seven dogs, and then you die.” Though I can’t remember who said it.
JS: That’s a great way of thinking of it, though it’s sad that it has to be that way.
SN: But it’s true, they don’t live long at all, dogs. When you get a dog, you are setting yourself up for future grief, there’s no way around it. You’re going to outlive the dog, chances are.
JS: You’ve said that The Vulnerables and The Friend began as short pieces that you wrote for readings. I’m so curious about your writing process and how you know whether a piece is going to stay short or grow longer.
SN: I have Boston University to thank for those novels, because each began as something I wrote for the BU annual faculty reading. I wrote the first few pages of The Friend to fit the eight minutes each reader was allotted. I wasn’t thinking at all that it was the beginning of a novel—it wasn’t even a complete piece in itself, and there was nothing about a dog. I began by recording something I’d recently read, about a group of Cambodian refugee women in California, each of whom had consulted a doctor about the same problem: they could not stop crying. They didn’t know one another, but all of them had witnessed atrocities in their homeland. In some cases, the victims were members of their own family. It was so unusual, that some people accused the women of malingering. Anyway, it came to me, after I’d opened the book that way, to write: “This is the last thing you and I talked about while you were still alive.” “You” being the man who we soon learn has just taken his own life.
Around that time, the idea of suicide was on my mind because there were certain people in my life—friends—who’d told me that they believed suicide might be in their future. These weren’t cries for help—they didn’t seem to be in immediate danger—they’d just come round to the idea that it was possible that this was how they would one day leave this life. And I had already finished writing The Friend when one friend jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. I came home from teaching one night and saw an email from another friend of mine saying, “Call me as soon as you get this message.” And immediately I thought, “Wesley’s dead.”
Soon after the BU reading, I was invited to the University of Maryland, where I was asked to read for twenty-five minutes. So I extended what I had written for BU to fit that time, and by then I could tell that I had something I could go on with, something that could become a full-length novel.
I remember that, before starting The Friend, I had wanted to write a novel about trafficked women. But I realized very soon how devastating it would be to spend two years immersed in that brutal world, and I knew I couldn’t do it. But I did include some writing about that world in the novel.
During the pandemic lockdown, the faculty reading was online. And for my eight minutes I wanted to write about what was going on in my life right then. It just so happened that the first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years came to mind: “It was an uncertain spring.” And I thought, “You think yours was an uncertain spring!” I started writing about the spring I was living through, the daily walks in the city parks that I was taking at the time, and recording my observations and reflections, for example why the names of flowers are always beautiful words: rose, violet, lily, and so on.
JS: When I read The Friend, I couldn’t put it down. I devoured it. The way that you write and incorporate all these topics into your narrative is like a comfortable conversation with a very good friend that you don’t want to end. The topics that you’re thinking about, the friends you know, that just come up in the course of your writing, end up braided in—is that generally how your writing process happens?
SN: It’s interesting what you say about the tone, because I’ve sometimes seen The Friend described wrongly as a letter to the mentor who died, I suppose because at the beginning, and several times throughout the book, the narrator addresses him as “you.” But of course the novel is not in the form of a letter at all. She speaks directly to him from time to time because she’s thinking of him, but for almost all of the book she is addressing not him, but the reader.
But I think the reason some people have made that mistake is that I’ve said in interviews that I wanted the novel to have a certain hushed, intimate tone, which I compared to the tone of a love letter.
JS: Something I struggle with as a fiction writer is how to end—and where to end.
SN: Well, is it a short work or a long one? There’s a big difference.
JS: For me, the project is a long project. I don’t know how to end it. I especially love the ending of The Friend because the “you” shifts to Apollo. I was rereading it again recently, and I’m a nerd about point of view. I love the shift in the final section, the affection for Apollo. I wonder, how do you know, especially in a long project, what would be a good stopping point?
SN: Well, at least for me, it’s a hell of a lot easier to end a novel than it is to end a short story. How a novel ends is less important than how a short story ends. As George Saunders said, “The land of the short story is a brutal land, a land very similar, it its strictness, to the land of the joke.” And with a story, the ending really has to work, just like with the punchline of a joke.
I never really know how a novel is going to end until it’s nearly finished. Sometimes in the process of writing I’ll think, Oh, I know what should happen at the end. But then, as I write on, I realize that, for whatever reason, that ending is not going to work. So I try not to get too attached to whatever the idea was. But gradually, as I approach the ending, things have a way of coming together. It has happened, though, that it’s taken me an extraordinary amount of time working on the last few pages of a book. It can be such a struggle to get it right. For example, with The Friend, I was very close to the ending when I went off to a month-long residency for New York State residents at a place called Saltonstall, in Ithaca. And I thought it would take me probably a week or even less to write those last few pages, and then I’d start something new. But as it turned out, that “ending” grew and grew and became the whole last section that takes place at a beach house on Long Island, during which the narrator speaks directly to the dog, Apollo. I don’t recall how many pages it turned out to be, but much more than what I’d thought—in fact, I spent the whole month working just on that final section.
This is why I resist outlines, or clinging too hard to ideas about what should happen down the road, or at the end of a book, while I’m in the process of writing. I like to write blind, as it were, to have as much freedom as possible.
JS: That’s a really good way of looking at it.
SN: I think it’s important also not to think that you have to have a really perfect, smashing ending in order for a novel to work—just like you have to avoid the idea that you have to tie up every loose end. The best ending, in my view, is one that leaves room for the reader to continue to imagine what might happen after that last page is turned. The reader should be able to see the characters living into the future. Though of course the dog in The Friend doesn’t live. (Laughs.)
JS: (Laughs.)
SN: But it’s interesting to think about the narrator. She’s come to some kind of acceptance. She knows that she’ll soon lose Apollo, just like she lost her other beloved friend, but she’s grown in some really significant ways. She’s understood something about death and loss, and about love and friendship, and what friends owe one another.
JS: Understanding and accepting is a great place to end. That’s where I struggle with what I’m working on.
SN: And it can be a lot more satisfying than a shock or surprise ending.
JS: I am curious—you’ve said in interviews that your work is memoir in form, but fiction in content. Does that still ring true to you?
SN: It’s true for some of my work. A lot of what I’ve written can be described as hybrids. I don’t write autofiction, though I understand why some people think that’s what it is. That’s perfectly reasonable, because they don’t know everything about my real life, but they do know that I share many important things with several of my protagonists: age, gender, profession, marital status, hometown. And of course there are autobiographical elements in most of what I write. But the vast part of any fiction I write is just that: fiction. I never had a mentor who took his own life and left me his dog. No friend with terminal cancer ever asked me to help her face her final days, and no one ever asked me to take care of their parrot during lockdown leading to an encounter with a certain beautiful but troubled young man. I just made it all up. And that’s true for all my fiction.
What’s not fiction, however, are the observations and reflections and opinions that are included in my first-person novels. The narrator’s consciousness, in other words, is identical to mine. When she talks about books she’s read or movies she’s seen or what she notices when she’s walking through a park—that’s all also me.
When I received an honorary doctorate from Skidmore recently and was asked to give their annual Frances Steloff Lecture I was told that, given that it was supposed to be a lecture, if I decided to read from my most recent novel, perhaps it would be more suitable if I read the nonfiction parts. I went through The Vulnerables and culled a series of excerpts and discovered a whole 40-minute lecture about writing and the writer’s life embedded in that novel.
The truth is, even when I’m writing about something that isn’t fiction, something that actually happened, I’ve discovered that I can’t go three pages without starting to make stuff up. Of course this isn’t true of my one nonfiction book, my memoir of Susan Sontag, which is pure nonfiction start to finish. But, for example in The Friend, I begin with the true story about the weeping Cambodian women, and after about a page and a half I find myself writing “This was the last thing you and I talked about while you were still alive.”Pure fiction. With The Vulnerables, I stayed a bit longer in the world of nonfiction because I was writing about my own experience during the pandemic. But again, very soon I began to make things up.
Bu that’s exactly why I became a writer, not to write about myself and my life, not to write memoir or autofiction, but because I wanted to tell stories made up out of my head. I would have had a very hard time being a journalist. I would’ve had to check and check everything I wrote a hundred times to make sure I really was sticking to the facts and not in some way coloring them. I didn’t have that problem writing about Sontag, though, even though I was writing strictly from memory. Many people who knew her as well as, or better than, I did read the book, and not one person has disputed or contradicted anything I said.
JS: Would you ever write a true memoir like that again?
SN: I don’t think so. I wouldn’t even have written Sempre Susan if it hadn’t been commissioned. Another writer, Elizabeth Benedict, was putting together an anthology of writers on their mentors, and she invited me to contribute an essay. It was about twenty pages, and after it was published, James Atlas, the publisher of a very lovely small press called Atlas Books, got in touch to ask if I’d be interested in writing a book about Sontag. And I said, “Well, not a biography, not a critical study, but I could write about another hundred pages of memoir about her.” And he said, “That would be perfect.”
But, given that I’ve already written a memoir about a certain period of my life, and given that I also included much material about my parents and my own early life in A Feather of the Breath of God, not to mention all the material about writing and teaching that appears throughout my fiction—I’m not sure how much I have left to write a memoir about.
I’m amazed that Margaret Atwood has just published a new, 600-page memoir, given that she’d already written quite a bit about being a writer. I’m a big fan of her book Negotiating with the Dead, wonderful essays about her childhood and her literary career. And yet she was able to produce so much more.
Also, though I’ve written about my parents, and about Sontag, I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing about other people I’ve known. I attended Barnard College between ’68 and ’72, and I set my novel The Last of Her Kind in that place at that time. But none of the characters is recognizable as actual people I knew. No person could point to a character and say that is was even based on them. I was very careful about that. And I would never write about my siblings, or my close friends or ex-partners, or anything about my personal romantic life.
JS: In your first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, you write about being a ballet dancer, which I think is also true.
SN: Yes, I studied ballet when I was a girl and used that experience for one section of that novel.
JS: I wanted to ask about that, too, because so many of the people I know who are either MFA students or other writers that I’ve met often have another art form. For me, I’m a very mediocre musician, and there are a lot of visual artists in our MFA program. Do you feel that your experience in ballet or your exposure to all other arts enriches your writing? Because I think it does for me, for music.
SN: I think it does for me, too. But I don’t think it’s necessary, because there are plenty of writers who have no strong interest in any of the other arts. For me, though, dance was important for other reasons. First of all, learning ballet is very challenging, and, when you begin, you can’t help being very bad at it. You do the steps in front of a mirror, right? And there is no way to hide the fact that you look terrible, even comically so at times. And you have to find it in you to keep at it to get past that. And, needless to say, there’s a great lesson there.
When I started teaching writing, I would often remember the very young ballet students I knew, how dedicated and disciplined and stoic in the face of criticism they were. I’m talking about kids who were still adolescents. On the other hand, many of my grad students had no discipline, were not willing to work hard on their manuscripts, resented being asked to read other writers’ work, and were not open to criticism. The difference was really striking.
Another important thing about being a dancer for me was that it was something I passionately wanted and that I ended up failing at. And I came to see that early failure—not only because I started too late, when I was already in high school, but because I didn’t have the necessary athleticism—as one of the greatest influences on my life. It’s the failures in life and how you respond to them that tell you who you are, that teach you what you’re made of, and what you can survive.
JS: Yes, I feel that way about my other artistic pursuits, as well. I’m not a good musician; I never was. But it’s kind of being in that space with something that you love.
SN: Something you love and something that’s much bigger than you—music and dance and the arts in general.
JS: And that still gives you something that you can love and enjoy even if you’re not actively participating.
SN: Absolutely.
JS: I find myself to be a better consumer of music than participant.
SN: But also, studying in itself is good for you, whatever the discipline and whatever your skill level. I was supposed to go to Spain recently, a trip I’d known about for quite some time. I was only going to be there for about 10 days, but I thought, “I’m not going to be one of those Americans who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish.” So I decided to learn as much Spanish as I could before going. I studied Spanish every day, up until the trip was canceled. And I didn’t at all regret the time I spent studying. I never considered it a waste of time. In fact I found it highly enjoyable, even a kind of relaxation. And studying dance, despite my failure to become a professional dancer, was good for me too. To this day, I find I don’t suffer from the kind of physical problems common in people my age.
And studying music must be, I think like studying a language. I mean, you’re doing a really good thing for your mind, for your soul. And hey, you don’t have to deal with all the bad stuff, because of course being a professional performer isn’t the easiest job in the world. Think of all the sacrifices you have to make.
JS: Right, exactly.
SN: I’m thinking of Peter Martins, one of the greatest ballet dancers of our time, who once said that just because he loved to dance didn’t mean that he loved putting on a costume and makeup and going on stage night after night. And I remember hearing Yo-Yo Ma, when he was still a young father, telling an interviewer, “My son thinks I live in the airport.” And I’ve always wondered about that. What if you’re a great musician who has no desire to be a globetrotter? A great artist who hates to perform? The life of the writer is so much simpler!
JS: You’ve taught many writing workshops. Right now it seems like there’s a lot of debate about the traditional workshop form and whether the writer being silent should continue. I’m curious what your thoughts are on the traditional workshop form and pros and cons of that form of teaching writing.
SN: I think it’s interesting that it’s the only structure that we have—or at least the only one everyone seems to use. I myself never show any of my work to anyone until it’s finished. For me, the idea of fifteen different people reading something of mine in progress and giving me their fifteen opinions, I don’t think that would be very helpful to me. But when you’re teaching, you have to find a way to make it helpful, because that’s the way we do things.
I don’t think it’s helpful to tell someone what they should write. That always has to be left to the writer. I’ve often heard students say things like, I think it would be better if the doctor-character were a woman instead of a man. I don’t see how that can be helpful. The truth is, the traditional workshop works very well for some people and not well at all for others—which is why office hours are so important. I’ve had situations where I felt that when I was alone with the student I was able to undo some damage that was done in class.
But the wisest thing that was ever said to me about workshop was this: If what people are saying confirms some idea, perhaps some concern, that you yourself had about the work—a character’s not coming through, say, or the ending doesn’t work—fine. But if what everybody is saying makes no sense to you, and you can’t even figure out how they could have arrived at such a view, then it’s not in your best interest to pay any attention to it—not even if the criticism is unanimous. Because how can you use something that you don’t understand?
Also, it happens sometimes that whatever opinion the first person to speak in a workshop expresses, somehow the whole class discussion goes in that direction. If someone else had spoken, with a different opinion, the discussion could have gone in a totally different direction. And then there are so many workshop horror stories, like one I heard recently, from a very successful writer, who, back when she was getting her MFA, was put down by another student in class who said, “I don’t understand how she even got into this program.” Nothing that terrible happened in any class of mine, but I’ve heard plenty of outrageous, inappropriate comments.
JS: Before I started the MFA program, I was in a writers’ group where I brought in a chapter of the novel I’m working on to have everyone read. Someone said to me, about a very minor character that was in that chapter, “I think the whole book should be about them.”
SN: That happens a lot. People make suggestions that are so far away from what you yourself were thinking. That’s why I believe suggestions should be strictly editorial ones, such as “I already know this from what you said before, so I don’t think you really need this paragraph,” or “There are so many characters introduced in the first two pages that I couldn’t keep them straight.” I think what works best is to say, This worked for me, this didn’t work for me, and being able to say why or why not.
JS: It’s almost like crowdsourcing. If everybody was confused about something, that’s good to know. And that’s been very helpful for me.
SN: Yes, exactly.
JS: A thought that I had recently, and in The Friend you attribute this to the deceased friend, is that no writing is ever wasted. Even if you throw it away, you’re going to learn something. I’m curious about your experience with anything that you maybe have put aside and then come back to.
SN: It’s true, no writing is ever wasted. Sometimes you have to write a great many pages that you’ll end up throwing out in order to find your story. I guess I have less “waste” than other writers because I don’t write drafts or outlines. I write about eight pages and go over and over them until they’re as good as I can make them, and only then do I move on. By the time I finish the book, it’s been revised so many times while in progress that I don’t really have much work left to do. Other people, though, can’t write something unless they get it all down, no matter how rough, in a basic draft. And then they write as many drafts as they need to. A process like that probably generates a lot of material that gets thrown out.
I don’t have a stack of unpublished manuscripts stored away somewhere, as some writers do, but I do have some things that I wrote when I was young that weren’t published. And I don’t think of any of that material as work wasted. I remember hearing Philip Roth say that every time he started a novel, he generated about 200 pages, and out of that he found about 60 or so pages that he’d keep and go on with, and he discarded the rest.
When I told this story to my MFA class at Columbia, they were like, Ugh. It just horrified them to think of having to write so many pages you weren’t even going to use. And I get that. All that work for nothing? But of course it wasn’t for nothing. It was to get a new novel going. You can think of it as no more a waste than rehearsing something, over and over, in order to prepare yourself to go on the stage.
There’s a very good writer named James Lasdun. In one of his books, Delirium Eclipse, a story collection that came out in 1985, there’s a story called “Property.” He’s also a poet, and the writing is beautifully poetic, and I’ve always considered it to be a perfect story. When I met him, I told him how much I admired it, and he said, “Oh, that’s so great to hear. And you know, that story was like a gift. I sat down and wrote it all at once.” And I thought, how was that possible? I couldn’t imagine how even a great poet could have written such perfectly composed pages all in one go, without any revision. I can’t even write an email without having to revise it at least once.
It’s true that for a person to write a whole novel, which doesn’t work, and then to have to throw it out and start all over again—that can be disheartening. But surely a writer learns a lot and gains skills from having done all that work, and in that sense, again, it’s not time wasted.
JS: I have a broad view of that, too, because I do write a lot in my job. And people are always like, how is this the same, how does that have anything to do with fiction? But writing is writing. Whether I’m writing an email or something to file with a court, it’s all writing.
SN: It’s like my Sontag memoir. That was nonfiction, and nothing like any of my novels. But the process of writing is always basically the same. You’re still trying to find the best words in the right order, or the right words in the best order—I can’t remember which it is. Which should it be?
JS: I love it. It works either way. It’s just the process of turning over words and reorganizing them and seeing what looks best and what reads best.
SN: And what’s most precise.
JS: So you’re coming out with a short story collection, It Will Come Back to You. What was the process of that? I know a lot of the stories are already published.
SN: They’ve all been previously published, yeah.
JS: So when you put it together, what was that experience like?
SN: Again, I wasn’t planning to do it. I’ve written various stories over the years, and maybe once or twice in the past couple of years, when I’d published a new story, my agent would say, “Maybe it’s time to think about a collection.” And I would think, maybe not. I was always too busy working on novels.
But after I’d finished The Vulnerables, instead of starting another novel I wrote a story, and once I’d finished it, I found myself immediately writing another one, and then yet another one after that. Which was unusual for me. There was another story which I wrote while I was working on The Vulnerables. And I thought these newer stories might go well with the best of the older stories. I wouldn’t have wanted to publish a collection of stories all of which were published years ago. I chose thirteen stories, a couple of which are quite short. The first one was published in ’93, and the last one was published in ’24.
And then I had to write another story, because I got something called the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, which is from Yale, and one of the requirements for receiving that award was submitting an original piece to be published in The Yale Review. That story did not end up in my collection, because, though it worked as a complete short story, I decided it was also the beginning of a new novel. It’s going to be a very short novel, and unlike my three previous novels, it’s not in the first person, and it doesn’t include any autobiographical elements. I really wanted to go in a different direction with a new book.
JS: That’s always been my sense about point of view. The nature of the story is going to be different if it’s a different point of view.
SN: It really makes a difference. And I have to say, it’s been fun writing in the third person. It’s a significant departure for me, because I came to see The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and The Vulnerables as a kind of unofficial trilogy. I never planned it, but that’s how it turned out—the same narrative voice, the same sensibility and prose style, and in each an animal character. How do I know it’s a trilogy? Mainly because I know that another novel in the same vein would not work. I can’t write another first-person narrative about an older woman who’s a writer and a teacher, who lives in New York, and blah blah blah, and this time there’s a—what—a pet hamster?