Poured Over: Sigrid Nunez on The Vulnerables

By Jenna Seery / November 16, 2023 at 6:00 am

The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez reflects our complicated and constantly changing world, featuring unlikely connections and even a parrot named Eureka. Nunez joins us to talk about the autobiographical details in her works, her unique writing process, incorporating humor into her novels and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.          

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.      

Featured Books (Episode):
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
First Love by Gwendoline Riley
Seven Steeples by Sara Baume

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and I have been reading Sigrid Nunez for quite some time. And I’m so excited to have her on the show. The Vulnerables is her new novel, a lot of folks came to her when The Friendwon the National Book Award in 2018, which suddenly seems like very long time ago. But I remember reading you when I was a little younger and a lot more impressionable that Feather on the Breath of God was your debut. And wow, that book stuck with me. And so when I’m reading The Friend, and I’m reading, What Are You Going Through? And I’m reading The Vulnerables. I hear a little bit of that narrator. Oh, novels, right. Am I right about that? Absolutely. Okay. Oh, absolutely.

Sigrid Nunez

Yeah. In fact, when I finished The Friend, it was all done. And I thought, you know what, I thought this is the same narrator as my first book of Feather on the Breath of God, older. That’s exactly what happened. And then the next two books, because they are very much connected to the, you know, because that is also the same barrator so they are too, but it is interesting that I did not realize that while I was working on it, or it just never occurred to me, it was a long time ago, and all these other books, you know, been in between, but you’re absolutely right.

Wow, okay. Sometimes, you know, obviously, readers bring their own experience to the work. And I did have a moment of, Am I stretching? Am I pushing something here, but I’m actually really glad to hear that. Because when I read, Feather, and for listeners who haven’t read Feather yet, please go read it. But it opens with the story of your dad, who is Panamanian Chinese, you were raised in New York. And your mother was German. They met when your dad served overseas in the military during World War Two, and she gets the next section. And then there’s the narrator and dance and that’s, I don’t want to spoil anything. I realized the books been out for a minute, but… and then there’s sort of, well, a wild love affair with a Russian immigrant. And those are the four pieces of Feather. And yet, there’s a lot about writing and the writing life, and creativity, and grief, and language. So all of the things that I think of when I think your work right now. And I will say I’m also very much a fan of the last of her kind, but we may or may not get to that one in this conversation, we might have to have a second conversation for that book. Stylistically, though. There’s also a continuity outside of the voice, right? Wouldn’t you say?

Yes. I mean, the thing is that in the first book, you know that the narrator is an aspiring writer, but she’s not really a writer. She’s teaching ESL, but she’s not she hasn’t published anything. She doesn’t have an editor or anything of that kind, not even articles or short stories. You certainly no, no book, you know, she is an aspiring writer, and she’s a reader, and she does make certain references to things that she’s read. And she does, quote other writers. And that is something that is done even more heavily in these later books.

Weike Wang is a writer you and I both love and, you have the great good fortune to be very close to her as a friend. She has this line that I’m going to lift from a joint interview you too did with T magazine, where she says, “Sigrid has a great presence on the page in this playful, organic way of navigating storytelling.” And that’s exactly how I think of your work, especially the last three novels and The Vulnerables. There’s a parrot, I think we should start with Eureka because I got the galley. I saw the jacket, great jacket. It is fabulous jacket. But I thought okay, so we’ve gone from Apollo, my favorite Great Dane, to a couple of different iterations of cats. Let’s put it that way. And now we have Eureka, who I’m very glad to have met in the pages of a novel and I’m very glad and I’m not sure I’m a bird person. I know I’m a dog person. I’m not sure my bird person. But can we talk about Eureka because I think there is a connection to Virginia Woolf, you suggest in this book.

Oh, that was very unusual thing that happened, okay. Years and years ago, a former student of mine I had been teaching at Smith. And this was after she had graduated. And we were still in touch, and she gave me as a gift this children’s book called The Widow and the Parrot by Virginia Woolf. And that had been something that Woolf had written for her nephew’s newspaper? And I don’t know, when it became a book long, long after her death, certainly, I completely forgot about it. And I was near the end of the book, and I’m looking at my bookshelves, and you know how thin a book like that is. They’re on the same shelf. And then there’s that, what’s that? I thought was that then, and I pulled out my oh my god, I completely forgot about this. And so it just so happens that I gave that memory lapse to my narrator. Right towards the end, I have the narrator say, I had forgot I forgot that Virginia Woolf wrote a book about a parrot. So it’s just one of those kind of wonderful coincidences, you know, there are a couple of them towards the end, the fact that then any air no writes a book called the years, you know, which is the thing that I started my book with. And I started The Vulnerables. With that, because we were living in pandemic lockdown. And it was an uncertain spring, to say the least. And we kept hearing all the time. Nothing is certain but uncertainty in these times. I mean, that’s we were living with that. And that just came into my head. Wasn’t I didn’t remember anything else about the years. But I really didn’t start with it was an uncertain spring. And I thought, well, a lot of it is just a strange kind of luck. Things just started coming together. I mean, there was also the fact that I had talked about the ball, the French galley more and then and then it turns out that she, you know, she is in that collection. So lots of things of that sort anyway,

When did you sit down to start The Vulnerables? I mean, you’ve done — ‘18 was The Friend publication 2020, What Are You Going Through? And here we are in 23. So you’re writing these books at a pretty quick clip?

Yeah, I guess there’s like two years. And yeah, well, what happened was right, and What Are You Going Through came out in September, the fall after an unusual spring. So it happened was okay, because you know, it takes time, right. So I had handed that book in more than a year before, let’s say, or a year before. The fall before, I wasn’t working on a book, I had been writing some review essays. And I believe I’ve worked on a story, but I wasn’t ready to start, I didn’t have an idea that I wanted, you know, for a new novel. And then and then the pandemic hit. And like everyone else, I was stunned and not really able to work and you didn’t really particularly want to work. So I was that I had this review essay, I was writing about Garth Greenwell, whose work I really like. And it was, you know, I it was a long essay, long review. So I was working on that, but then I stopped because everything stopped. And I didn’t manage to get back to that. So that’s what I was working on. And I finished it. And then I was teaching at BU. Yeah, between 2011 and 2021. I was teaching there every fall semester. And being on the faculty, I was part of the annual spring faculty reading. This time, it was on Zoom. And there are so many people reading that they say, don’t read for more than eight minutes. And I thought, Okay, well, I want to write something new for this. Now to back up a little bit. In 20, whatever it was, when we had the BU annual reading, I did the same thing. I started something new. And what that turned out to be eventually was The Friend. Ah, you know, I thought, well, it doesn’t have to be something complete eight minutes, four pages. So I started with what would in fact, turn out to be the first four pages of manuscript. So same thing, I thought, let’s just start something. And I had the idea that with Virginia Woolf, and I just started writing, and then again, I stopped, you know, because of the situation that we’re all in. And I’m not sure exactly how much later it was, but eventually, then I thought, no, no, you’ve made this beginning. Let’s just see where we can go with this. And that did turn out to be the beginning of The Vulnerables. Now, what’s going to happen to me now that I’m not teaching a BU anymore, I’ll never be able to write another book.

You know, I’m not entirely sure. I mean, I’m laughing as I was doing the prep for the show. You know, the New York Times headline after you won the National Book Award was kind of like overnight success after eight books and a 20 plus year career. I think similarly, it’ll be okay. I just, I think she’s okay. I mean, I certainly love reading you. The intimacy of the new book, though, does match The Friend and What Are You Going Through? And I get to, I love that, I really, I dip right back into your world? Yes, it’s been a couple of years. I dip right back in. And I’m thinking, well, is this the same woman? I always do it sorry, it’s just a force of habit. But we meet her sort of gaggle of girlfriends, they all have names that derive from flowers. And there she’s doing that thing. And can I assume that she’s a version of you? I know, in the past, you’ve talked about whether or not your work is autobiographical, but I feel like you like keeping that line very blurry.

Well, definitely, because it’s not it’s not autofiction, which is kind of genre, okay. But it is, you know much, much autobiography in my work. And in these particular books, it’s very clear, at least, to me, what it is, is that I have this narrator, I create a narrator who has a lot in common with me, she’s around my age. It’s a woman, she’s a writer, she teaches writing, she lives in New York, she loves animals. Okay, so the way I would describe it is that when the narrator is reflecting on something, or having opinions about something, or you know, just kind of what I call, literary thinking, right, that is me, those are my observations. Those are my reflections. Those are my questions about the world and life. But then there is this other part, which is the storytelling where things happen, and that’s all invented, you know, I didn’t have the mentor, I didn’t have the Great Dane, if, if only however, when, in that book, where the narrator starts wondering why she feels the way she does, and then remembers how her last cat died, and how she felt about that, that was not invented. So they really are hybrid books. But there certainly is a lot of me in there. And I don’t just mean in the sense that, you know, any book is has a lot of whoever wrote it in them for obvious reasons. You know, I mean, that the, you know, between me and the narrator, as opposed to the plot, such as it is, you know, a very, very much identified in, for example, I would never give to one of those narrators, any kind of point of view, that wasn’t also mine.

Is that why they stay unnamed?

Well, that’s a very interesting question. I never made any kind of decision whether to have the narrator named or unnamed, but what happened was, I would start writing and at some point, I would think about having a name for the character. And then I would put that name in there and well, okay, with The Friend, it never came up, you know, and other people aren’t named in there, either. It’s really, uh, Paul was the only character. So that kind of works naturally to never name anybody, wife, one wife, two wives. You know, the mentor, you the with the second book, I thought, well, you know, I don’t have a rule about not naming. So, you know, I’m writing and there was a character, the ex, the one who gives the lecture, the beginning of the book, I believe I was calling him Richard. Then I’m writing along, and he’s being called Richard. And then I was trying to think of a name for the narrator. And as I tried to have these named characters, things got clunky, it didn’t feel right, I got a little blocked. And so I got rid of the names and then went on. And what’s so interesting is that I then read it read an interview somewhere with Anna Burns, who wrote Milkman and somebody asked her the question, Well, why don’t you name your characters and she said, that exact same thing, that she had put names on the character to the characters she had given them names. And then she somehow it wasn’t coming. And she took the names out, and she was able to write again. So this time, I can’t quite remember what I kind of figured I think that I was not going to end up naming the character, the narrator. But then I wanted to use the two fact that a computer once came up with a suggestion for my name as “sugared nouns” because that happened a long time ago. And I’ve always wanted to use that and I thought, well, if you do that, you are basically saying that the narrator’s name is Sigrid and I thought, Okay, well, so be it. I haven’t done that before. I have never called my narrators Sigrid before, but he or she is sugared nouns.

It’s funny though, because I don’t feel like— I loved the wife, one wife, two wife, three. All of them were they’re very Are you very distinct personalities, and I really appreciate that about them. But I don’t feel like I need names to know where I am. story at all. And I mean, I like the gaggle of friends who all have, you know, there’s violet and Iris and Lily. And yeah, Lily. And I mean, I thought that was kind of a clever device that’s pulled them together in a bouquet. A bouquet Yes, in a nifty way, in a nifty bouquet. But I feel like there’s a certain level of implied trust that you’re saying to the reader, you can do this, you can follow me, you don’t actually need, you know, the clearest roadmap in the world because I mean, there is a little bit of dreaminess, your sentences are very clear. And they’re very, very fun to read. But there’s a little bit of you play with time and markers of time you play with memory, you play with identity, everything’s always kind of in flux. You’re doing a lot in very short office.

Well, I guess also with the naming of the narrator in certain characters. I mean, it’s, it’s fairly common now for people to write books where they don’t name the narrator or some of the characters and I’ve never had any trouble following them. So I didn’t think it would be a difficult thing. And with the flower names, the thing is that early on in her ruminations during lockdown about going for walks and seeing all the flowers, it occurs to her as it has occurred to me that, why is it that all flower names are tend to be beautiful words, some of them so beautiful, that they’re the kinds of names that people choose for their baby daughters. And I couldn’t think of any ugly name I thought of Snapdragon which you would never name your little girl Snapdragon. And I said, but that would be a good name for a cat. So then, when I start talking about these friends, I’m implying that I am a writer, and that I’m writing about real people. Which, by the way, I’m not except in the sense that these women are like my friends. You know, I’m not basing any one of them on any particular woman, but you know, they are recognizable to me as the things they say that their humor above all, I feel like I’m, I’m with my friends, my girlfriends. So I start by saying, I could call her Lily, or Rose or Violet, okay, let’s call her Lily. And then, you know, every woman that I bring up and giving the name of a flower, it’s connected to what happened at the beginning of the book, but the reader understands these are not their real names, in that sense. So it’s kind of a joke.

You sneak jokes in quite a lot in all of your work. It might not have been a complete joke, but you do have a little riff on The Great Gatsby, in The Last of her Kind.

Yes. And I mean, I met every word of it. I mean, that could have been published as nonfiction. And I didn’t just attribute that to my character, some readers have thought I was trying to make her look stupid.

I was not one of those readers. Oh, no, I was not.

Absolutely, absolutely.

That is part of the fun of reading you though. I mean, there are references to J.M. Coetzee and Elizabeth Bishop, and, you know, writers that I’m not necessarily reaching for now, but are certainly part of my reading life. Sort of, you know,Waiting for the Barbarians still seminal work. It’s been a really long time since I’ve read Disgrace, but it’s like walking through a very smart library, the way you sort of send these moments out into the world. And you’ve always said, you’ve always been very, very clear about this, that writing to you is, it’s a calling it’s a vocation, it is. It’s about the sentences and getting it right, and doing the revisions, and all of that. And I’m wondering, though, because you make it look so effortless on the page. Can we talk about process for a second? Because here, you’re just saying, Well, I just throw in some jokes, and I’m like, but structurally, it’s a little more complex than just saying, I’m going to tell a joke here. And I know you didn’t work from an outline. So this book, The Vulnerables, where?

I think well, you know, I think it’s because if it ends up looking like it was easy, it’s partly because that, that prose is pared down, okay, we’re used to like, you know, you read a really, you know, a Baroque prose style and you think, wow, it you know, like, extended metaphor that pile up of, you know, descriptive accumulate of details I mean that, if I sat down to do that, it would it would be a lot of work. So I think it’s, you know, no matter how much work it is, for me, the fact that I do try to be clear and precise and to have a kind of pared down style. I think that that’s one thing that makes it look easy and it doesn’t make it also easy to follow. It’s also I think, because you are with me, you are following me exactly in my foot exactly at my side, while I’m doing this, because I do it completely linearly, right, don’t make the outline, and I don’t put one section there and then revise that and move things around. Because I am going step by step, I’m writing something, I have an idea, I have some thoughts, something happens, then I have some reflections. And then I move on. So everything does come organically out of what came before. And I think the reader does experience that long with me. And as far as the humor goes, it’s not like I ever have beforehand, you know, at some point, I’m going to plant a joke, what or something humorous, what happens is that I’m writing along, and then something that happens to be funny, occurs to me, and I put it in, and then I, you know, later I might worry a little bit about it, because you know how it is with humor, you always worry that what is funny to you might fall flat to someone else. But then I have I have my editor, my various, my agent, and they will say that joke does not that just I didn’t even get or whatever. So I feel safe, you know, to try to do that. And so I guess, you know, in a way it reflects my personality. I mean, I think that, you know, people are funny, and life is funny. And I also feel that, you know, the comic is such a an important part of life. And speaking of right with The Vulnerables. As you’ll recall, this pandemic happened, this incredible crisis and the lockdown happened and what’s the one of the first things that people did, they started filling your feeds in your inbox with some really wonderful jokes. And I can remember and videos it was so much a part of the experience that people were coming up with brilliant humor. And the comic has its place. In fact, it has a big place.

And it has a really big place in The Vulnerables too because our narrator doesn’t quite know how disconnected she is in some ways. And you throw in a college student, you throw in a college student that she is fully unprepared for she has moved out of her. This is not a spoiler. She’s moved out of her apartment, she’s given her apartment over to a healthcare worker who’s in from Portland to help because we all remember what those early days were like in New York, Veche, am I pronouncing that right?

That’s correct, which is the name of a weed as you know.

Yes. We have some fun, and she is not prepared for Veche or his veganism, or his view of the world and everything else. And then we have Eureka the parrot. And I’m just going to laugh for a second because really we have a college student. We have our narrator and we have a parent in a very small space.

It’s not that small. Because I mean, because it is it is somewhat large. It’s a three bedroom apartment. But still, I mean, it’s locked down. So everything is going to feel kind of small.

I mean, it’s certainly not having a harlequin Great Dane in a studio apartment.

No, it’s exactly, exactly.

Three bedrooms doesn’t feel quite as big as under normal circumstances.

And one of the bedrooms has been set up for the bird, the bird. So really, it’s really, it’s the kind of thing that crazy people do. You know, the crazy people with a lot of money do.

I bought into it immediately. He has his own room. Absolutely.

This large cage in the room with the drawings of jungle on the walls. Well, we’ve all seen things like that, right.

This is also one of your recent books. And one of the things we’re talking about is how people respond to loss, how they respond to stress, how they respond to suffering, right. I mean, it was not a great moment for us collectively, as humans as we tried to figure out what was going on and what was going to happen next. And here you are with just enough humor and the right mix of characters and the right mix of story. And I trust you, I trust your narrative voice. I’m like, okay, let’s see where this goes. I mean, part of my lizard brain still remembers how unpleasant it was. And part of me is just like, Okay, I’m gonna let Sigrid tell me where this story is going. So as you’re sitting down to figure out where this is going, because again, you don’t… How much were you able to surprise yourself as you’re creating this world? And these people, because again, you know, this narrator’s voice, you know, her from earlier books, certainly you’ve explained, sort of the Sigrid, slash narrator. Separation let’s call it, this is all not totally familiar terrain, but it’s not completely unfamiliar, either.

I think what surprised me a little bit was in both of the previous books. And in fact, in my in my first book, to some extent, there is a very large focus on other people. In other words, like, you know, and that’s also true of my book for a winner, which is, which is about a woman who served as a nurse in during the Vietnam war in Vietnam. You know, I realized that’s something that that really appeals to me to sort of write about the lives of other people as I see them. And as a writer sees them that’s really dominant in what are you going through, where she keeps running into people who tell her things she even wants into a cat who tells her his whole life story. But here, because of the limited number of people that she’s encountering, and because of the situation, I had to go deeper into her character and her issues, her problems, and she does unexpectedly get that when she gets depressed. I mean that but that’s what happened to people. I mean, this is this is a book that’s that I feel connects me to everyone who went through this pandemic, she gets depressed, she feels lost, she just she has writer’s block all these things, things that I actually didn’t want to write about. I write about writer’s block, who wants to write about writer’s block? Also? She has that the agoraphobia that, that struck so many people, which is was unexpected. I kind of when I was writing, I resisted I thought, Well, no, that’s let’s write about that. Let’s get those girlfriends back. Let’s you know, but I realized that it had to be done for the book to have the force I wanted to have, and for it to connect her to everybody else in that situation. It couldn’t just be about that and what he was going through,

Right, or the parrot. There’s a verb and a forward motion to the story. And given how internal it is, that’s a very tricky thing to pull off. As you know, if we go back to The Friend for just a second, you’ve said in the past, and you’ve written different, I mean, you had a different pandemic novels centered on a 13 year old, you’ve done the last of our kind, which was the friendship of the two women in college and into, shall we say, you know, 1968, and then there’s also Mitz.

Oh, it’s, yeah, it’s Mitz the Marmoset, which is a book about an animal, but which started out its life as a as a children’s book.

Oh, I was wondering about that. Okay. Yeah. So you’ve done I just want to be clear for folks who may not know your back catalogue entirely. Yes. I started with Feather on the Breath of God. And certainly, you know, The Friend and What Are You Going Through and, and The Vulnerables sort of sit on a continuum, you figure out this voice sort of, after you write a memoir of your friendship with Susan Sontag, who was a mentor for you. And you studied with Elizabeth Hardwick for your MFA. But writing the memoir, you said, sort of freed you up for this new body of work? The Friend, which then leads to What Are You Going Through? And I’m wondering, that surprised me when I read that, I think is one.

I can’t remember what I don’t remember what I said.

I actually have it here. You told the Paris Review, you were talking about the restraint of the memoir and sort of that linear structure. And I was like, well, hadn’t you done that before? And maybe it’s because it had come after some other novels that were a little more traditional, maybe in structure?

I’m not sure I’m not gonna I can’t remember what connection I was trying to make with Semper Susan the memoir of Sontag since you brought up Hardwick I mean, it’s interesting, because there I was a student. When Elizabeth Hardwick was writing Sleepless Nights, you know, you forget these things. But when I think about my first novel, and then these three novels, that book was obviously Sleepless Nights was obviously a huge influence, right? You know, and I’ve taught it a few times over the years. So I would reread it, the Sleepless Nights is auto fiction. I mean, I myself invented, but they also she is somebody who she talks about other people, she keeps herself in the background to some extent. And she also references things that she read. So you know, it’s all there. So that’s, that was a very big influence. You know, I still think that, you know, the biggest influence on the friend and what came out of it, these other two books was my first book was just that I didn’t really go you know, those routes without, without actually being fully conscious that I was doing that when I wrote Semper Susan, I felt that it was very much the same in the same in the same mode as these other books, except that nothing was allowed to be invented not one tiny thing. So in a way, I feel like it’s very similar to those other books. And perhaps it’s because I’d written Salvation City, which is not most other books, right? Lately not. And then instead of going on to another novel, I started writing Semper Susan. And so you know, maybe it was a kind of bridge. And then in between Semper Susan and the friend, I had written this noir that I talked about, and that I ended up not publishing, but I have, you know, I did, I’ve used material from it in, What Are You Going Through.

Which was always fun to stumble across as the narrator is reading mystery novels on her bed?

Yes, yes, that’s the thing is that I knew that I wanted that narrator to have a book in progress that she was. That was, that was a mystery. And I couldn’t use a real book. Because I couldn’t just, you know, use somebody and you know, use somebody else’s book and summarize it. So I had to I had to have a mystery. And I just happened to have one that I’d written myself. So I was able to use that.

I think I would still read that mystery, by the way, even though I know some of how it sorts out. I think I would really like to see you do some sort of mystery novel. But you know, we’ll see. You have time.

And I’m not working on anything right now.

So you’ve mentioned Garth Greenwell, who’s terrific. And I know you’re a fan of Weike Wang’s work and where you were her teacher and chemistry actually had started as her thesis in her MFA at BU, which I hadn’t made the connection between you and BU until I was reading this piece. Who else have this sort of recent cluster of young writers this sort of really ringing your bell?

There’s Sarah Manguso? Yeah. Oh, yeah, she’s great. I just had new novel coming out, maybe this spring, sometime late winter spring. Um, and you know, and she’s written a lot of nonfiction. I think this is her second work of fiction. And then there’s a recent discovery, a British writer named Gwendoline Riley, the New York Review of Books sent me these two pack paperbacks. One is called My Phantoms. And the other one is called First Love. And they’re short novels. Really very, very wonderful. And there’s another writer named Sarah Baume, whose most recent book is called Seven Steeples, which is a very unusual book, and I really very much like that. And I’ve long been a fan of Jenny Erpenbeck, who’s still quite young. So those are just some names. It’s hard. It’s hard to keep up. I mean, there’s a lot of work out there. I don’t know recently; I’ve actually been reading novels, this is not a young person. She’s 80 years old, the Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya. I first heard of her work from a profile that Masha Gessen wrote in the New Yorker, and I think she’s written very, very, very, very many books. I think there are about eight in available in English translation. And these are books about pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet life. Very, very dense books. Very good. Very good books.

The I have both of the Rileys that you mentioned, I am have not gotten to them yet. But you know, one of the things about working in books when regardless of which side of books you’re on, things tend to gather sometimes a little more quickly than we were planning, and they pile up. I am looking forward to getting to the Rileys but we need to get through the rest of the season of the show. And then I can do lots of things like that. And you were on staff at the New York Review books, right. I know I read the Garth Greenwell in the New York Review.

I was on staff there. In my youth. I graduated from Barnard was 1972. And I was working elsewhere. I think I would work briefly at Putnam and maybe some publishing houses an editorial assistant. And then I stopped by Elizabeth Hardwick’s office, and I told her I wasn’t happy where I’m working. And she said, Well, you know, maybe Bob Silver’s at the New York Review, you know, he’s always looking for editorial assistants, because there’s such a great turnover there. So I work there right out of school, well, I’d have been working elsewhere, so a few, a few months, because then I went back to school to get my MFA at Columbia. And then once I left Columbia, maybe I was a year out or so I went back and work there for about another year was a strictly clerical job. But as I point out, sometimes, the office that Robert Silver’s worked in was a large, both of his assistants were right there in the same room, he wasn’t even in a private office, and we didn’t have a private office. So everything that he did, you know, talking to all, you know, extraordinary writers, either them coming by to work with him right there, by his desk, or him talking on the phone, or, you know, whatever it was all it was all right there. And in addition to that, we, we got all the mail, we were supposed to open it, we were supposed to read it. So, you know, it was kind of extraordinary education in the contemporary literary scene, it was a good place to spend some time. And we do, we did enjoy it, we did not enjoy it, it was it was a difficult job. And it was a lonely job and all that. But you know, but I did end up feeling grateful for it. I

I know, I mentioned this earlier on the show. But part of the fun of reading you though is when you slide in these lines, from writers. And you know, sort of knowing that you had come out of the New York Review, even though it was quite some time ago, it’s a treat to see you connect all of these dots, to whatever you’re doing in the present moment. But also, you’ve always been very clear that writing was nothing for you. And in fact, you’ve said things like, well, you know, if you quit dance, you quit dance, but you can’t really quit writing because you just can’t quit writing. And so you’ve been teaching for quite some time, as well. But really, it has always been about the words and the work and the books and the essays.

It has, yes.

It’s such a wide body of work. I can see sort of the through lines of your interests, and I can see the big ideas that are sort of driving all of the work. But is there something you haven’t done yet that you really want to do? I mean, Salvation City, you’ve got the first I think that’s the first time you have a child narrator

Correct, he’s not the narrator, the protagonist. But yes. And male the only man right, okay. I can’t remember exactly how old he is in the what is it? 10 or something? That is the only time I have a young person.

I mean, is there an idea like that cooking somewhere in a notebook?

Not exactly. But I do. I do think now, time has passed and I’m older. And I do have these regrets, which I didn’t have when I was much younger, about all kinds of writing that I’m not going to have time to do like I did. I didn’t want to write that war issue, or I have a fantasy about well, how about if I hadn’t had time in life to write something entirely different from these kinds of books, like these intimate books that are, you know, partly autobiographical, like, for example, a historical novel, a mystery novel, children’s books, try a completely different style. I mean, you know, I adored Virginia Woolf. Well, those styles, you know, I mean, just that trying to experiment with writing something in that kind of more, you know, more developed style, more elaborate style, because I do love sentences. There’s not going to be time to do that. And it’s not going to be true to me at this age, either. It’s not time to play. It’s just not it’s just not it. I can sense that. I don’t know what I’m going to write next. But I’m not going to you know, try My hand at a historical novel, it’s just it’s just not going to happen. So that yes, that’s a good that’s a real regret. And I’ll it started a, a couple of years ago, you know, when I realized that I that there were so many things you could write, like, for example, I started writing this literary criticism not that long ago, I kind of regret that I hadn’t done more of that. More nonfiction, more memoir, even, you know, like, just so many things that a biography of some all these things and maybe way, way back, I, you know, I could have thought that you’d you know, you don’t have the time to do all that you just don’t.

You don’t consider The Last of Her Kind, historical? Um,

I do. But I meant something, you know, you know, something like maybe that took place in a different century.

Got it. So more along the lines of like, The Fraud Zadie Smith’s new novel.

Exactly, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s the way that you know, when you read her writing about how that came to be, and it was always cooking there. Yes, exactly. Something, you know, because I share with her this, this thing about Dickens. And so, yes, I would have loved to try to write a Dickensian kind of novel, that kind of book.

Every now and again, someone will say, well, you know, this is 1965. It’s technically historical. And my eyes get big. My eyes get really big, though, when someone says, well, it’s set in the 80s. It is technically historic. Wait a minute, this was not that long ago. I’m not prepared to call that historical fiction.

That’s interesting, because I remember at some point, I read a rule about that. Don’t ask me what it was. But they said, in order for a book to be called historical and has to have taken place, and I forget what the cut off was, but even 68 did not make that cut off at that time. It’s not it’s not it’s a novel set in the past was not we call historical.

Now, I’ve heard anywhere from 30 years, which is technically a generation, to 50. Yeah, 50 does, but it’s creeping up in ways where I’m kind of like, hey, wait a minute. I’m on the cusp of people who grew up with technology and not technology, like my brother and I used to fight over who got the phone, that kind of thing, because my parents, there’s one phone, it’s in the kitchen, you can share it. So it’s a totally, totally different way of looking at the world. Do you think you’re coming back to our narrator? Or do you think we’re getting another book? At some point, I realize you just said, Well, I don’t know what I’m doing next. But something tells me that you really like dipping back into that particular voice.

I do. But there’s a problem now. And that is and I didn’t, again, I didn’t plan this. But what I discovered was that these three books, The Friend, What Are You Going Through and now The Vulnerables is to make a kind of loose trilogy? They do. They do? Yes. And that was totally not planned at all. And it kind of it’s interesting, because when what are you going through came out? There couldn’t be any in person events, but I did several online events. And one people I had a conversation with was Curtis Sittenfeld. And she said, Well, you know, it does seem like these two books are in conversation with each other. And then she said, Could you imagine writing a third, I had not yet started writing The Vulnerables up. But I didn’t think of it that way. But pretty soon I realized that that is the way it was like those two books were crying out for a concluding volume. And now I’ve done it, I can’t imagine you know, it, it can’t be a fourth, you know, there has to do something else has to happen. And I’m not sure what that would be. So if the new thing I worked on, if it was a new book, if it had I mean, I imagine it would have the same sensibility, the same, the same tone and the same concerns. But I need something, I need something else, I do not want to just, you know, go on as if you would turn the page of The Vulnerables in here and it went,

I feel like there’s a lot churning in the back of your brain, even though you and I are meeting over the screen. And I think there’s quite a lot happening. So before I let you go, I don’t want people to think that we’re talking about your debut a Feather on the Breath of God, as you know, the start of this four book series. That’s not the conversation you and I are having. But to see the evolution of your voice across these books and to hear you say, well, it really wasn’t the plan. It’s kind of great. It just reminds me why we do this thing, right. Why you write, why you tell these stories, why you mentor these young people and teach writing, the way you do that we have a chance to watch things change on the page. And I think that’s kind of great. I so appreciate you your work, I just really needed to tell you that. Thank you so much. I appreciate these novels. The Sigrid Nunez thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over The Vulnerables is out now, certainly The Friend is available and What Are You Going Through and even A Feather on the Breath of God novel but start with those four. Thanks so much Sigrid.

Thank you so much.