What am I going through
On Monday night I was “in conversation with” Sigrid Nunez “at” Harvard Bookstore, but actually on Zoom, to discuss her new book What Are You Going Through. In the book, an unnamed narrator goes around talking to various people (and one cat) about what they’re going through. It’s riveting despite being very digressive, and despite its unconventional plotting. Basically — I don’t think this is a “spoiler,” any review would probably tell you this — the narrator has a longtime but not super close friend who’s dying of cancer, and who wants her the narrator to provide company and complicity when she ends her own life. The book is a series of conversations between these two women, and also some others. By the end, everything you’ve expected to happen has happened, but a lot of minor unexpected things have happened, too. It’s not exactly “a stranger comes to town” or “a hero must defeat a monster,” but there is certainly something structural at work that keeps the reader turning pages.
Sigrid said that she thinks what makes her books interesting is the intimacy of first-person narration — I’m paraphrasing, obviously. Basically, she relies on the idea that it’s hard to turn your attention away from someone who is speaking to you directly. Creating an “intimate voice” allows her to eschew things like detailed physical description. In her recent novels, the reader is conscripted into collaborating in building the book’s world, given a minimum of information. Sigrid made it clear that she doesn’t think this is the one true way to write a novel or anything. “The house of fiction has many windows,” she said, paraphrasing a much, much longer Henry James quote about the house of fiction, its infinite windows, and their pierceability via vision and will.
It was a complexly reassuring conversation for me in many ways, mostly because as I start work on my third novel I’m trying to figure out if I can skip over the step where I end up throwing away half a draft that turns out to be unsalvageable garbage. Sigrid has been writing books for a long time, with an admirably single-minded focus. Her instinctive sense of what she can afford to leave out has been honed via decades of practice. Even if I can’t evade the garbage draft entirely, maybe I can waste slightly less time, this time. Maybe I can be more disciplined, more focused, and better at planning ahead. (Maybe!!!)
I asked her about the part of What Are You Going Through where the narrator has a conversation with a cat, not really knowing what I was after but feeling like I might as well get her to talk about cats. She said that part of the book had been fun to write, and that it seemed important to pay attention to that. In classes she’s taught, students have often said that the parts of their stories that other people enjoyed were the parts that were most enjoyable to write. Sigrid said it was important to pay attention to what comes easily.
I thought about a time, much earlier in my writing career, when I’d written a heartfelt essay about a tormented relationship with someone I was close to. I had sat down and written it through, spending a day at my desk, feeling like I was really nailing it, moving myself almost to tears by the end. The next day I asked a reader I trust to take a look at it, because I was so proud of myself. He told me it wasn’t good. When I looked at it again, I saw that he was right. So I don’t know about trusting what comes easily, for me.
The other interesting thing that happened that night was that I experienced a flare of jealousy when the moderator read off Sigrid’s credentials — she has won a number of prizes, including a Whiting and a Guggenheim as well as a National Book Award. Even as I was experiencing this feeling I recognized its absurdity. Sigrid Nunez is one of the few writers who I think deserves every prize she has ever received, and then some! Still, it was hard not to dwell on my lack of credentials when our bios were being read back to back. In reality, though, comparing myself to Sigrid is absurd. She is a master, at the height of her powers, for whom everything inessential has long since burned away. I’m, you know, me.
The best cure for jealousy is work. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. And even though it’s very distracting to be alive right now, reading and writing are still more effective than anything else I know at banishing feelings of pettiness and futility.