Thursday, February 23, 2012

SIGRID (SHIT) NUNEZ and I

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SIGRID (SHIT) NUNEZ and I



Book Review

‘Sempre Susan’: Sigrid Nunez Studies Sontag While Smooching Her Son

By James Camp 3/22/11 11:16pm
In 1978, when People wanted to interview Susan Sontag, the writer wondered aloud how Samuel Beckett might respond given the same opportunity. It was not unusual for her to invoke Beckett in this way. “When she worried she was making too many compromises,” Sigrid Nunez recalls in Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (Atlas, 140 pages, $30), “she would say, ‘Beckett wouldn’t do it,’” There could be little doubt that Beckett (“Every word is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness”) would have skipped the interview with People. But in 1978, Sontag went ahead and did it anyway. The mantra of her resolve to rise above it all–Beckett wouldn’t do it–could equally express a sinking feeling of self-dissatisfaction. Beckett wouldn’t do it, but Sontag had.
With the exceptions of T.S. Eliot and Henry James, no American writer has been more famed for her Europeanness than Susan Sontag, and very few indeed could have led lives as persevering in their contradictions. “She was like Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay,” as Ms. Nunez sums it up, “stuck at Q, dreaming of Z.” A dedicated writer, Sontag “simply could not bear to be alone.” An avowed feminist, “she found most women wanting.” Sontag had disliked her childhood with a bizarre, bad-tempered intensity, and yet “people close to her often compared her to a child.” “She was a natural mentor … who hated teaching,” Ms. Nunez writes, but by this point the pattern is so familiar readers can reproduce it on their own. Had Sontag been born with an innate genius for the drums, she would have become the hardest-working second violinist of all time.
“In general,” writes Ms. Nunez, “she had contempt for people who didn’t do what they truly wanted to do.” Sontag truly wanted to write novels, but she is mostly remembered, with reason, as an essayist. In one of the most celebrated of her essays, it seems now, she may have unknowingly glimpsed herself: “In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” As she discussed the Bee Gees with People, she thought only of Beckett. There was something undeniably a little camp about Susan Sontag.
Ms. Nunez writes beautifully, but if her memoir offers the most revealing portrait of Sontag yet, it may partly be because she has sketched it from an odd angle. Or rather, several odd angles. For Ms. Nunez, Sontag was a boss, a mentor and a friend; also an antagonist, a roommate and a prospective in-law. They first met when Sontag hired Ms. Nunez as an assistant in 1976. Only 43 years old, Sontag had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer the year before. It had nearly killed her, and the rigors of survival had maimed her body and disarrayed her life, leaving her with an accumulation of unanswered letters that she did not have the stamina, as she recovered, to cope with on her own. Ms. Nunez, a young writer, was brought in to help her cope. She had already worked at The New York Review of Books, and its editors, sensible of Sontag’s needs, had suggested the arrangement. Of its draws, not least was the proximity of Ms. Nunez’s apartment to Sontag’s penthouse on Riverside Drive, where “the work” was done–and where Sontag’s son, David Rieff, then a student at Princeton, still lived. “It was exactly the kind of odd job I was looking for then,” Ms. Nunez recalls, “the kind unlikely to interfere with my writing.”
About this Ms. Nunez was wrong. The mail seems largely to have been ignored as the two writers gossiped their way to a fast friendship. Ms. Nunez was shy at 25, and Sontag’s charismatic frank attention must have been intoxicating. “I remember thinking as I walked home how laid-back and open she’d been–much more like someone my own age than someone of my mother’s generation.” Within weeks, and with no small meddling on Sontag’s part, Ms. Nunez was dating Mr. Rieff, whereupon the three, in a decision whose precise rationale the reader would be fascinated to learn but doesn’t, moved in together. “She referred to us as the duke and duchess and duckling of Riverside drive. I knew that wasn’t a good sign.” Proximity was a draw, but a coupledom of three would have its drawbacks. Soon Ms. Nunez had quit working for Sontag and returned to the NYRB. But she continued to see Mr. Rieff, and would not move out until 1977.
Sempre Susan recounts the saga of this ménage and of its author’s friendship with Sontag, which would hang on, with waning intensity, until Sontag’s death, in 2004. It is also a requiem for Ms. Nunez’s love affair with Mr. Rieff, which ended much earlier, in the winter of 1978, when they had “one last fight.” Ms. Nunez graciously claims that “Susan could have lived on the moon and David and I would not have worked out,” but to read the book is to awaken to the pain of uncertainty this sentence stoically denies. The romance Sontag had bearishly encouraged she would frustrate like an ogre. She was restless, she was lonely, she was insecure, and her tactlessness could be staggering. At lunch one afternoon with Mr. Rieff, Ms. Nunez and a fourth, Sontag advised the couple freely: “Why don’t you two just sixty-nine? Then you won’t have to worry about birth control.”
But Ms. Nunez is alive to much more in Sontag’s character than the flaws. She honors with new evidence traits we have long ascribed to Sontag, like her vivacity and gift for friendship, as well as a few traits we are accustomed to denying her, like a sense of humor. Indeed, Ms. Nunez is so careful of her subject that she has not divided her story into sections or chapters–the fear being, perhaps, that Sontag cuts too protean a figure to be rendered by conventional means. The unconventional result is that her prose is left to follow the eddying currents of the author’s memory.
In different hands, this could conceivably be the recipe for chaotic failure, but here the effect is economy, a brisk freedom to note what matters and nothing more. Also, urgency. The flitting from fragment to fragment has a whiff of desperation about it, as if the author were laboring under pressures she could not quite withstand, but this is only fitting. Among the pressures, after all, is death. As well as a memoir, Ms. Nunez’s book is an elegy for a great woman and the company she kept, the vanished salon where she was the center. “Most of the people in this memoir,” Ms. Nunez notes, “are dead.”
Among the dead is Joseph Brodsky. Sontag briefly dated Brodsky during the first months of Ms. Nunez’s relationship with Mr. Rieff, and the poet features in many of the book’s most diverting sequences. A ribald, talkative presence, prone to off-color punning (Puerto Rico was “Muerto Rico,” and the “young women of Mount Holyoke, where [Brodsky] taught, were ‘Mounties’”), Brodsky could outdo Sontag both in heedless self-absorption and European-style imperturbability–though of course Brodsky, a Russian, was hardly more European than his paramour. Late in the book, Ms. Nunez reflects on something he had said over dinner: “You know in the end, none of it matters, what happens to you in your life. Not suffering. Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.” “Now, that’s European,” Ms. Nunez concludes.
Sontag adored Brodsky and all that he embodied. Still, not everyone can accept so phlegmatically that their lives are as ripples on the water. Ms. Nunez recalls what Sontag used to say when, deep in her writing, she felt Mr. Rieff and Ms. Nunez had been neglecting her: “If you won’t do it for me, at least you could do it for Western culture.”
editorial@observer.com

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  • I have been around. This work can be classified as:
    Highway Robbery of The Apple Dumpling Gang by Jack Bickham.
    It is a worthless piece of S*H*I*T.
    Susan would have assassinated Sigrid for anything less vulgar as this trash.
    …and I am Sid Harth@topcogitoergosum.com


  • Anna K.
    I just finished reading Ms. Nunez’s memoir and all that comes to mind is: what’s the point of crafting these beautifully written reviews which say nothing, one way or the other, about the book at hand, merely dash off its more limber moments in a kind of catalogue (a process equivalent to a movie trailer). As Nunez herself writes, “Besides, she said, people are sheep. If
    one person says something’s good, the next person says it’s good, and so
    on. At a certain point, people didn’t even look at the work anymore;
    they simply made up their minds about it based on what had already been
    said about it.” Susan Sontag did a lot for “Western culture,” most of all demand the rigorous critique of all of its forms of production. Among the things we know about S.S.: that she was ‘handsome,’ that she was ‘humorless,’ what her favorite words were, all about her lesbianism. Yet no one has taken to heart Susan’s most potent lesson—challenge basic assumptions and be critical of everything. In other words, don’t be a sheep. Here’s the essential distinction between American and ‘European’ thinking. p.s. Re: Joseph Brodsky. I’m pretty sure being a member of the Russian intelligentsia makes you as much of a European as any Parisian—and on the basis of outlook alone. That the author would imply otherwise is not only insulting, but poor reportage.

Bookslut

October 2010

Melynda Fuller

features

An Interview with Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez’s fiction frequently transforms sweeping, tumultuous eras and events in history into smaller, poignant moments of reflection. The Last of Her Kind follows the friendship and fallout between two college roommates through the ’60s and ’70s; For Rouenna reveals a new face of the Vietnam War, a lonely military nurse nostalgic for battle; and Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury re-imagines the lives of Virginia and Leonard Woolf through the eyes of an exotic pet while allowing readers a glimpse into the darker days of the coming Nazi occupation in Europe.
Always one to explore the unexpected underbelly of human experience, Nunez’s fifth novel, Salvation City, looks to the near future rather than the present or recent past. The coming-of-age tale follows Cole, a 13-year-old orphan, after a flu pandemic has struck civilization, leaving cities piled with corpses and born-again Christians eagerly awaiting the end of times in the country. Soon after the death of his liberal, atheist parents and fresh from recovering from the flu himself, Cole is sent to live with evangelical Christians in Salvation City. Encompassing ideas as diverse as first love, the bonds of blood and friendship, and the higher power of belief, Nunez extracts hope from a difficult reality.
Late last summer Nunez and I sat down in a New York coffee shop while the heat wave raged on outside to talk about her new novel, the healing power of art, and Susan Sontag.
Salvation City and The Last of Her Kind seem to hover briefly over a point in time after which the world is unrecognizable to the main character. The Last of Her Kind was based on a very specific, highly documented era, while Salvation City is different in that way. You reference the 1918 flu epidemic in the book, but the landscape is very much one of the 21st century that doesn’t fully yet exist. Where did you begin when creating your not-so-distant future?
Actually, I didn’t start with the idea of an epidemic but with an idea for a character. In my other books, the main character has always been female, and I knew even before I started this book that I wanted the main character to be male, not for any other reason except that this was something I hadn’t done before. And once I had invented the character of young Cole, of course I had to invent a story for him, and a world for him to live in. I thought also it might be interesting to set the story in the near future, something else I hadn’t done before. This was a couple of years before the 2009 swine flu outbreak, but it had been on my mind for some time that another pandemic like the Great Flu of 1918 was something scientists were calling very likely, though no one could predict when it might actually strike. And I knew that during the Great Flu many children had been orphaned — the writer Mary McCarthy was one of them. And so a story began taking shape. Because the time is the immediate rather than the far future, except of course for the havoc wrought by the pandemic the world isn’t radically different from our world today. I didn’t set out to write a sci-fi book or a traditional dystopian novel. And it’s not a post-apocalyptic novel, either, because although the pandemic inflicts extreme damage on the world it does not destroy it.
The decision to switch from featuring an adult female as the main character, as you do in most of your past novels, to a young boy in Salvation City was really interesting. Did you feel any hesitation about taking on a new voice that may not have been as familiar because of his age or gender?
No, I didn’t feel any hesitation. I didn’t think it would be any more difficult to imagine myself into the mind of a 13-year-old boy than it has been to imagine myself into the minds of other characters. If you’re a writer, you’re always observing other people, all kinds of people, trying to understand how they think and feel.
I really appreciated your ability to tell the larger story of a pandemic from the viewpoint of a child in Salvation City. Part of the reason it felt so authentic was that he seemed so detached from it all. He’s dealing with the deaths of his parents, trying to fit in with a new foster family who is the exact opposite from what he’s known, and he’s recovering from sickness himself. But I felt like Cole responded the way any adolescent boy would to the situation, by exploring first crushes and drawing comics, for example. How did you maintain the balance of allowing Cole to remain a child throughout the story while also creating a rich landscape and plot that went beyond his experiences?
Well, in fact, Cole changes pretty dramatically in the course of the novel, during which he goes from age 13 to 14 — a critical year in most any life. And given all that happens to him, he’s forced to grow up fast. But an important decision I made early on was not to have Cole be the book’s narrator. He is the dominant consciousness, of course, and for much of the book the reader sees things though Cole’s eyes, but as you say, at the same time there’s a larger, non-subjective view, enabled by the third-person narrator. One of the reasons it appealed to me to put a young person at the heart of the story was that I wanted to write about someone not yet set in his beliefs. I see the novel as being largely preoccupied with belief — belief in self, religious belief, belief in love and family. For much of the story we see Cole confused and troubled by the conflicting beliefs of various adults. The process of him sorting out the truth for himself was, for me, particularly interesting to explore.
It also brought up ideas about parenting and the effort of trying to instill values in children. But, ultimately kids are going to make their own decisions. And in his case his parents are gone.
His parents are dead — but are they really truly gone? That’s one of the big questions Cole is grappling with. Are his parents still his parents even though they’re no longer there? And if they are still his parents, why would he need any others to adopt him? And if he can’t bring himself to believe what his foster parents believe and want him to believe — that his parents are damned eternally because they did not accept Jesus — is it still possible for him to belong to their church?
I thought it was interesting that he used his art to try to fit into this situation. For example, he’d hear stories from the Bible for the first time and try to create comics out of them.
Right. Once he learns about Bible heroes he decides to create comics about them, though needless to say comic books about Bible heroes already exist. Cole has a young boy’s obsession with heroes, and he’s clearly more taken with the fantasy of being a hero than he is with being a good Christian. But the novel is also partly a portrait of the artist as a young boy. It’s easy to imagine Cole as the kind of kid who grows up to write graphic novels. It’s when he’s in an orphanage that he discovers what a great distraction and consolation drawing comics can be. In Salvation City, he keeps being told that the thing to do when you need comfort is to pray, but this doesn’t work for him. He does find comfort through drawing, though. And it’s also his way of escaping from reality. When he’s been drawing for a while and it’s going well, he stops missing his parents and stops agonizing over whether they really have been doomed to hell as he’s been told.
It was difficult for me as a reader to watch as Cole slowly lost parts of himself as he became more attached to his reality. I was wondering, was this something that you were hoping to show, Cole giving up pieces of himself in order to survive in this new place?
I don’t think he loses or gives up pieces of himself. I don’t see him as wanting to fit perfectly into the evangelical community so much as wanting to fit in as best he can. For better or worse, Salvation City is his home now, and he’s not unhappy to be there. This has everything to do with his relationship with his foster father, Pastor Wyatt, for whom he feels genuine gratitude and affection — and for good reason. But he never forgets or totally rejects his parents. In fact, as he says, he doesn’t want to be adopted by anyone. The longer he lives with PW and his wife, the closer he feels toward them, and this is only natural. And his parents, being dead, are beginning to feel more and more distant, and this is also natural. But I don’t see him as the kind of character who does whatever he has to do to survive. If anything, I see him as an outsider, both before Salvation City and after, maybe something of an eccentric. Not a nerd, but a loner. I also see him as a little bit like Holden Caulfield, though Cole is three years younger than Holden, and he’s not as knowing as Holden is. Cole does, however, share Holden’s idea that everything is a lie and that adults are dreadful, even toxic beings.
He seems to begin to accept Pastor Wyatt as being less of a toxic adult, though.
I think he gets PW right. He can see that PW’s got some wonderful qualities, that he’s basically a decent, loving, well-meaning man. But he’s also got a history of troubles, chief among them being alcoholism, and Cole isn’t blind to any of this. In fact, he even begins to see that he might end up having to take care of PW. This is part of the dilemma he’s presented with when he starts thinking about his own future and what kind of life he wants to have.
And as a reader, you’re left with the feeling that he’s going to figure it out.
Yes, the book ends on a hopeful note. I do think that, in the end, Cole has already figured quite a few things out and that he sees that sometimes the most heroic thing a person can do, rather than just accept what other people want you to believe, is figure out what to believe for yourself. And among other things this might mean understanding that, in various ways, for various reasons, people have lied to you.
I think that makes him a mature character, too, because many 13-year-olds don’t seem to figure it out as quickly.
But I think a lot of the time kids are well aware that much of what grown-ups tell them isn’t truthful. And of course many people who accept certain beliefs as kids, including religious beliefs, end up rejecting those beliefs once they’re old enough to make up their own minds. On the other hand, I’m always amazed at how many people there are who have very strong, very definite religious beliefs who’ve never felt the need to think deeply — if at all — about those beliefs. I’ve never quite understood the idea that belief is something that simply gets handed to you by your parents or your church, a tradition you just swallow without doing any thinking for yourself. Whenever Cole starts asking questions about God or what’s in the Bible, he’s told that he’s “overthinking.” But how can you believe seriously in anything without thinking hard about it? Obviously, though, a lot of believers don’t have a problem with this. Religion is a given.
It’s a shield, so they don’t have to think. I come from an area of the country where that is very prevalent.
Where? 
Western Pennsylvania. Born-again Christians were able to change my high school curriculum. I think that’s part of the reason that I really felt terror as I watched Cole move into that world. I felt like I knew who these people were going to turn out to be.
But from the beginning Cole isn’t the kind of kid who just accepts whatever he’s taught. Quite the opposite. With his parents, he tends to be against everything that they feel strongly about. For example, for a long time he refuses to accept their warning that if he doesn’t read books he can’t expect to succeed in life.
How close do you think we are to the world you’ve created in your book?
Actually, except of course for the panflu, the world of my novel isn’t all that different from our world today. Most of the problems I write about — extreme weather patterns, a dysfunctional economy, Rapture nuts, escalating culture wars — are already more than familiar to us. I do believe that a flu pandemic like the one that struck in 1918 would be catastrophic, and that, although scientists have long been warning that it’s not a question of “if” but “when,” we aren’t well prepared to deal even with a less serious one. And judging by recent incidents like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, we clearly don’t seem to be very good at handling emergencies. With the health care system as broken as it is, and with the kind of intense mistrust of government we see in America today, and the tendency of people in power to put financial gain ahead of the pubic good, it’s pretty scary to think just how bad things could get.
I studied ballet for a long time and I know that you studied dance as well. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how studying dance and writing are similar in some ways. The discipline that goes along with each can feel almost masochistic at times, but there’s also this idea that when you’re not studying or practicing or producing it almost feels like lost time. Do you feel that way at all?
I don’t feel the kind of discipline you’re talking about is masochistic. In fact, I think the kind of discipline you have to develop in order to pursue something as difficult as ballet is in many ways its own reward. Among people I know, it’s the ones who don’t work hard, who don’t have any discipline or work ethic, who tend to be the most depressed. In my first book [A Feather on the Breath of God], the narrator discovers that one of the many wonderful things about studying ballet is that it allows her to be a part of the world and removed from the world at the same time. And in my new book, Cole makes the same discovery about drawing. As for this question of “lost time,” or how it feels when you’re not working, I think Margaret Atwood got it just right when she said, When you’re writing you’re not living, and when you’re living you’re not writing, and there is always that tension.
Can we talk for a minute about your forthcoming memoir about Susan Sontag [Sempre Susan]? I was wondering if you could talk a little about how she influenced your life as a writer and why you decided to write the memoir now.
I was asked to contribute an essay to an anthology called Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. In college, I had studied with Elizabeth Hardwick and at first I thought I’d write about her, but then it turned out that two other contributors were writing about Hardwick. So I decided to write about Susan Sontag, who was never a teacher of mine but who was in fact a bigger influence than Hardwick. I met Susan when I was just out of grad school and working as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books, for which she wrote often. Through her I met her son, David, who was living with her at the time. He and I then became a couple, and I moved into their Manhattan apartment with them. Anyway, as anyone who knew her could tell you, Susan was a natural mentor. She had a very strong didactic streak and a passion for sharing her enthusiasms, which were many. In fact, a person — especially a young person — could not spend any significant time with Susan without being mentored by her. Even someone who met her only once was likely to go home with a reading list. So many writers and artists who would become important to me I learned about first from her. And her attitude toward writing — how you must think of it as a vocation rather than as a career, how there was no point in writing at all if you weren’t going to take it utterly seriously, every word, every comma — this was very inspiring to me.
My essay was published first in Tin House, where James Atlas read it and asked me if I’d be interested in expanding it into a short memoir to be published by his house, Atlas and Co. So that’s how that book happened. It’s coming out next spring. After six novels, it was very interesting to write something that was not fiction.
I wanted to ask how the process felt different to you.
I have to say, I found it quite a relief not having to invent anything and not having to deal with the anxiety of where the story was going and how it was going to end. I say this because I don’t plan my novels out ahead of time and so I have to maintain a certain amount of blind faith that, somehow, though I’m making it up as I go along, by the time I finish it will all come together into a coherent and satisfying whole. But with the memoir, of course, I didn’t have to make anything up. And also, the memoir didn’t require research the way much of my fiction has. But writing is writing, of course, and putting thoughts into sentences is always a lot of hard work, always so much more work than you think it’s going to be when you start out. It was also very interesting for me to be looking back to a time when I was young, knowing I wanted to be a writer but before I had published anything. The book isn’t about me, though, it’s about her, or at least about how I remember her. She was an important influence on so many other people besides myself, and as a mentor — as in many other ways — she was somewhat larger than life.

Sigrid Nunez

[WRITER]

talks with

T Cooper

[WRITER]

“IT’S GETTING HARDER AND HARDER FOR A WRITER TO HOLD ON TO HIS OR HER DIGNITY.”
Things to do when travelling in Asia:
Buy remedies from men riding giant elephants
Watch monkeys from central casting pick fleas out of the fur on their butts
Don’t steal potatoes
Sigrid Nunez’s fifth novel, The Last of Her Kind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), was published in January 2006. A new edition of her first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), was also published in January, by Picador. Nunez’s other books include the novels Naked Sleeper (1996) and Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998), a mock biography of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s pet monkey. A new edition of Mitz is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press (spring 2007).
T Cooper’s second novel, Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes (Dutton), was published in February 2006 and cannot altogether inaccurately be summed up as the Jewish immigrant-Charles Lindbergh-Eminem novel. Cooper’s first novel, Some of the Parts, was published by Akashic Books in 2002. Cooper is also coeditor of a forthcoming anthology of original fiction entitled A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing (Akashic, August 2006).
T Cooper and Sigrid Nunez first met in 1998, when Cooper was a student in the Graduate Writing Division at Columbia’s School of the Arts and Nunez was working there as an adjunct professor. Their conversation took place in Manhattan over a period of several days this past winter.
18 April 2006

I. MARSHALL MATHERS

SIGRID NUNEZ: I wanted to tell you a funny thing, since you’ve got a book coming out too. This writer I know said the closest experience he’d ever had to having a book come out was chemotherapy.
T COOPER: That’s drastic.
SN: Somewhere in a letter Virginia Woolf tells Vita Sackville-West that a bookseller had asked her if the two of them would sign copies of their latest books, and Woolf said she told him, “Of course not!”
TC: God bless that woman.
SN: Imagine yourself telling them that at Barnes & Noble.
TC: Hell, I’ve been asked for ID twice when I was trying to sign books in stores.
SN: What do you mean? Who did they think you were? Some stranger trying to sign your books?
TC: I don’t think they’d ever seen an author before—these were Barnes & Nobles in the middle of nowhere, and they had a small stack of my books, but they still thought I was making it all up. Even after I pointed to my picture on the back cover, I just got these blank stares, and then the manager was called.
SN: What a bizarre story.
TC: I remember Paul Theroux saying something in a review of Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene about our living in a time when writers get “bullied” into becoming part of the whole marketing machinery and having to participate in a kind of crazy, inane exhibitionism that we now all take for granted. I get what he and Woolf are hitting on, but I have to say that, for the most part these days, I think writers—except for a select few—are mostly ignored by their publishers and booksellers.
SN: That is a common complaint.
TC: I’m thinking of that recent Times Book Review back-page essay about how constantly annoying and tedious authors are to their publicists. Don’t most authors practically beg for more publicity? I can’t imagine someone saying no to doing footwork on behalf of his or her book.
SN: But there are authors who won’t do any readings or signings.
TC: I can’t think of any author I know who’d say no. Name one.
SN: Pynchon, famously. And DeLillo, I believe—
TC: Yeah, and Roth. But I mean authors whose books don’t automatically shoot up the bestseller list.
SN: What I remember thinking when I read that article was that it’s getting harder and harder for a writer to hold on to his or her dignity. Sometimes, it seems to me, it’s not just that writers are becoming increasingly less important to the culture but that they’re seen more and more as desperate and pathetic figures, targets for ridicule. But bringing out a book was probably always hard. Woolf, for example, always had to brace herself because she knew how much she was going to suffer. The fear of being exposed and humiliated just about unhinged her. Some people think it had something to do with this shame she carried around with her from childhood, when she was molested by her half-brother. But I don’t think that was necessarily it. I’m sure lots of writers go through something similar, if not so extreme.
TC: I think I can appreciate that sense of exposure. Like, I just puked it all out for the book. It’s almost embarrassing to say any more about it.
SN: It wasn’t really that with Woolf. She was just so terrified of bad reviews. Did I ever tell you my favorite bad review? It was one of those “Die, Author, Die” reviews, and you only need to know the last sentence: “Nunez can’t even manage that.” By the way, I wanted to ask you about the reviewer who said a character in your book “shares the author’s ambiguous sexuality.” Would you call that crossing a line? Because I don’t think I’d ever refer to an author’s personal life that way in a review.
TC: I’m not upset about it, but I have to admit it was a little startling to read in a review that I have “ambiguous sexuality.” I mean, for several years now, like since I was about eighteen, I’ve been pretty settled in my sexuality, and I don’t know what, if anything, that could possibly have to do with my fiction. And the character doesn’t have “ambiguous sexuality” either, or even gender ambiguity, if that’s what the reviewer meant—he presents as a man in the world, and has a girlfriend. I don’t know. I don’t want to go all crazy New Criticism here, but I thought it was weird.
SN: The character we’re talking about is called T Cooper, “the last living Lipshitz,” and he makes a living impersonating Eminem at bar mitzvahs. What is it about you and Eminem?
TC: I think we are separated-at-birth twins. We were born a day apart in October 1972. He just seemed to fit into the story I was trying to tell about this immigrant family’s assimilation, the obsession with blond-haired, blue-eyed American-ness as represented by Charles Lindbergh. And, to me, Eminem is a sort of modern Lindbergh. But mostly I just like him because he says “fuck” and “shit” and “cunt” a lot, and acts like he doesn’t care what people think, when you know he really does. Plus, he’s incredibly talented—as talented as he is vulnerable. Who knows where he’s going to go next, but at least up until this point in his career he’s used this invented alternate persona to speak his truths and offer a social critique without being gagged by political correctness. And I can really appreciate that. Do you ever listen to him, or know much about him, aside from the negative press?
SN: I’ve never really paid attention to anything about him, positive or negative.
TC: That settles it. I’m making you a mixtape. [Laughter] So yes: bad reviews. But let me ask you, is there anything in particular that someone’s said about your work that you really, really liked?
SN: This wasn’t in a review, but someone once said about reading one of my books that it was like drinking a glass of cool, clear water. I really liked that. What about you?
TC: One time a reader emailed me a photograph of the inside of her forearm, where she’d tattooed the last two sentences of my first novel. That was pretty stunning and humbling, though I have to admit one of my first thoughts was, “Maybe I should’ve connected those two sentences with a semicolon.”
SN: I just remembered the hilarious question your mother asked about advance reviews: “What happens if they’re bad?”
TC: I know. I asked her, “What happens if they’re good?” Nowadays she answers the phone, “Hello, this is Vicki Cooper, née Lipshitz.” She insists it’s her family history in the book. She even asked me how I could have learned so much about her family. I keep telling her, “That’s the point, Ma. Nobody knows the family history; I made it all up from one dubious fact.”
SN: You know what Czeslaw Milosz said? “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” I first heard that quoted by Philip Roth. It reminds me of how Lily Tomlin used to introduce one of her routines: “The following skit is about my parents. I’ve changed their names to protect their identities.”

II. CHARLES MANSON

TC: Speaking of slaying one’s family, I’ve actually been on a Roth bender lately—The Facts, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America.
SN: The only one of those I’ve read is American Pastoral, but I read it twice. I didn’t like it as much the second time, which surprised me. It always bothers me when I don’t like a book as much the second time. For some reason I always feel it’s my fault, like somehow I’ve become less interesting. What else have you been reading?
TC: Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, which is one of those breakthrough books of the internet era, and my favorite of the handful of his books I’ve read. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, by Jeff Chang, Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Now I’ve just done what I hate, listed all books by men. That doesn’t represent my usual fare, but I guess that’s just how the chips have been falling lately. I’m also alternating with what I call “candy”: trashy books I can eat up quick on the subway or plane. Ridiculous memoirs like 50 Cent’s From Pieces to Weight. Nothing wrong with learning a little about the ins and outs of the crack trade in southside Queens in the ’80s. And you?
SN: One of the best books I’ve read lately is A Woman in Berlin. It’s one of those books that proves it’s really true: if you find the right tone, you can write about anything. Here’s a woman who was in Berlin when it fell to the Russians in ’45—the book is the journal she kept that spring—and it’s mostly about trying to avoid dying of murder or starvation while being raped repeatedly by soldiers. But because she’s such a good writer, and there’s no self-pity in it anywhere, the book turns out to be incredibly readable and actually uplifting. And because she has such a wry sense of humor, against all expectations it’s even funny. I also read this strange, fierce little novel called The Days of Abandonment, by Elena Ferrante, about a woman unraveling after her husband leaves her for a younger woman. And Ali Smith’s new novel, The Accidental, which is terrific, and Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place, also new and also terrific—hey, all women. By chance, though, not by design. What other “candy” have you been reading?
TC: True crime books about serial killers—which I literally cannot get enough of, though I have to say that, like most things, nothing will ever beat my “first time,” with Helter Skelter. When I first read it in college, I didn’t know that my family had a connection with the Manson family, through one of the Manson girls, Gypsy [Catherine Share]. She babysat my older brother before I was born. She was the one convicted of armed robbery with five other Manson family members in that plot to hijack a 747 in order to get Charlie released from jail. One time, my father and I were driving around Los Angeles talking about the Black Dahlia and James Ellroy’s mother’s murder, and what it was like in L.A. when my dad lived there during all these killings. That’s when he told me that the FBI called him a few days before Gypsy’s release to let him know that they found his name in her personal effects, and that he should be on alert. He’d never made the connection that Catherine the babysitter was Gypsy the Manson girl with the shaved head and the 747 thing. I couldn’t believe he never told me until I was twenty-five or something.
SN: I read Helter Skelter for the first time while I was writing The Last of Her Kind. I never thought of it as candy.
TC: Candy, like Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, once I get going. You know, after reading The Last of Her Kind, I started wondering: why are the people of my generation so enchanted with the political activism of your generation? SDS and the Weathermen, the SLA, Kent State, and so on. Are we just losers who came of age in the ’80s and wish we had something like that of our own?
SN: Don’t look now, but oh boy, do you have something like that of your own.
TC: True. But we’re too jaded or something to drop out and drop acid and blow shit up in order to make ourselves heard. There’s no way college kids would do that now.
SN: And there’s no reason they should. But those are hardly the only ways to make oneself heard, and it would be such a hopeful sign if hordes of young people were to become politically engaged again. One of the things that made me want to write about the counterculture was hearing the way people who weren’t there talk about it today. Like one of my students who said that at first she was proud that her parents had been hippies, but as she grew older she became embarrassed. And another student said simply, “I hate hippies.” I had to wonder what this meant. And I realized also that, for many of them, the first thing that came to mind when they heard the word “Vietnam” was “the Wall.”

III. SCHOPENHAUER

SN: You know what? I feel like going somewhere. I’ve been wanting to go to the Bronx Zoo, where I haven’t been for ages. I just found out it’s open 365 days a year.
TC: No way. I’m still protesting because of Ota Benga, the pygmy who was displayed there after he was at the 1904 World’s Fair.
SN: I don’t know this story.
TC: It’s horrible. They housed him in the cage with the monkeys, and made him walk around the zoo in a white suit. The visitors would trip him and throw stuff at him. After people protested, he eventually went down to Virginia to work in the tobacco fields, where he got so depressed he shot himself through the heart.
SN: This would be very interesting to write about….
TC: Actually, Adam [Mansbach], my co-editor, wrote a story for our Fictional History anthology about Benga’s time at the zoo.
SN: Well, I don’t think you’ll find anything like that at the zoo today.
TC: Yeah, but I’m sure there’ll be something else that bugs me.
SN: I know a lot of people hate zoos, but I have to confess I’ve always been drawn to them, because I can’t get enough of animals. Or, as Schopenhauer says somewhere, “I love all animals, and the sight of any animal lifts my spirits.” When I was living in Berlin, which has two enormous, wonderful zoos, I kept going back because there were so many births. There was a baby rhino and a baby hippo and a bunch of baby elephants. There is nothing much cuter than a newborn elephant.
TC: How big are they?
SN: About the height of a Great Dane, but very sturdy and compact in this funny way—kind of scrunched. They look like small, gray Volkswagens. I was talking about zoos at a dinner one night at the American Academy in Berlin, and I mentioned that Leonard Woolf had said that you can tell a lot about a society from its zoos. And a former ambassador to China who was at my table said, “What? He said you can tell a lot about a society from its Jews?” “No, no. From its zoos,” I shouted. “Its Jews?” he shouted back. When it was finally straightened out he slumped in his chair and said, “I’m afraid I’m getting hard of hearing.” “No! No!” I screamed. And everyone in the room turned to stare.
TC: I have a friend who rescues unemployed elephants in northern Thailand, near the Myanmar border. There’s no more logging for the elephants to do, so they’re trying to save them from being poached for ivory and put them to work in the tourist industry instead. When I was in Cambodia this past summer, the medicine man in the Southern province of Kampot came into town riding a giant elephant that padded through the dirt streets, and all the kids would trail behind, and the old ladies would flood out of the buildings and pass money up for the remedies he was selling.
SN: Now that I’d like to see. So you were in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam—all for the first time this summer?
TC: I was in Thailand for a few weeks in 2001, but I was talking about this past summer when I was traveling in Vietnam and Cambodia for about five weeks, just wandering with no real plan. I ended up at Angkor Wat, which was, of course, mind-blowing, but was also sort of a shock to the system because, unlike most of the places I’d been in the weeks prior, Angkor was so touristy—this massive complex run for profit by a crooked oil company with all these tour buses belching black exhaust into the forest. Even the monkeys seemed brought in from central casting. I wasn’t on a tour, so I could stop by the side of the road and see them. One was bending down dramatically over a rock while another picked fleas out of the fur on his butt. I snapped a picture, but I was scared they’d bum-rush me and scratch my eyeballs out if I got too close.
SN: I think they’re more likely to bite than scratch. By the way, did you make this trip because you wanted to write about it?
TC: Not really, but I know I’ll end up writing about it in some way, some day. At this point, I’m just absorbing and thinking and mulling, writing a couple short essays, one of which is about this man I met in Kampot. His name is Cheangtry, and he told me about how the Khmer Rouge killed his mother and father because he stole two potatoes for them. He had to hide out by himself in the forest for three years until the Vietnamese came into Phnom Penh. He kept telling me that his story was no different from anybody else’s.
What about Berlin, are you going to write about your time there?
SN: I’m already writing about it—or trying to. But what about the zoo?
TC: Why don’t we go to Coney Island instead?
SN: Coney Island! That’s a great idea. I haven’t been there since I was a kid. It’s a place I always associate with my father.
TC: Isn’t that how your first book opens, with the first time you heard him speak Chinese? Wasn’t that at Coney Island?
SN: Yes. And I have this memory from when I was very small and we’re on the boardwalk and I’m watching him eat corn-on-the-cob…. We used to go in the water then, too, which I suppose some people still do?
TC: Yeah, but you have to watch out for the used hypodermic needles in the sand. My first novel opened there too—but at the freak show.
SN: Let’s go tomorrow.
TC: OK. We’re going to freeze our asses off, but it’ll be fun.
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Birnbaum v.

Sigrid Nunez

by Robert BirnbaumSigrid Nunez wanted to be a dancer, and lucky for her readers, that didn’t work out as planned. Nevertheless capable of some deft footwork, she explains to our man in Boston how the two pastimes are similar.
Somewhere in the conversation that follows, novelist Sigrid Nunez opines that great writing seems effortless. She might have been making reference to herself: When I finally picked up a Nunez novel, I was both surprised and pleased at the ease with which I was able to enter and quickly engage with this unlikely story of two college roommates in the volatile and hyper-exciting early 1970s. Apparently the odd gaggle of readers who make up the American literary classes concurred, pouring accolades and smart discussions on The Last of Her Kind. By the year’s end, it had made countless “best books of the year” lists.
Sigrid Nunez has published five novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and the recently reissued Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury.
As befits her serious commitment to the writing life, her work is regularly published in leading periodicals as well as being anthologized. She has won numerous awards and has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College and Washington University. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the RopeWalk Writers Retreat. Sigrid Nunez lives in New York City.
Claire Messud, an able novelist in her own right, perceptively writes: Sigrid Nunez is a memoirist of considerable gifts, which is worth remarking only because she is the author of novels rather than of memoirs. Using an intercutting of meditation and careful reconstruction, she has written an impassioned and complicated recollection transformed, by the author’s skill, into a work of fiction rather than of history.
Sigrid, who by the way is the child of a Chinese Panamanian father and a German mother, and I discuss her failure as a dancer, writing sequels (or not), what interests her, Susan Sontag and some of the usual things.
Robert Birnbaum: When I was thinking about what we might talk about, I was distracted by my recent acquisition of another iPod—watch me try to connect this [to something that makes sense]. And my big iPod has about 3,000 songs on it and my new one has a 400-song capacity. So I’m thinking about what happens when you try to narrow down your world to what you call your favorites. Though 400 favorites seems a bit much. But how is it as one gets older, that all the information and things that you have liked and that have filtered down, the songs, the literature, the poems, the life experiences? I wonder if they reduce down to just a few cherished things? Are you following me?
Sigrid Nunez: Yes you’re reminding me of one of my favorite quotes from Rilke, who said something like, “When a man is young he needs many, many books and when he is old he needs only a few books.” We all know what he meant, whether you agree with him or not. But at the time he said that life was very different. The universal library was a lot smaller, for one thing. And so the problem is you have to also take into account that now there is an overwhelming amount, an overwhelming number of books and songs and so on, we have access to. I am one of those people who is overwhelmed by all the choices.

All photos copyright © Robert Birnbaum, all rights reserved.

* * *
Nunez, by Birnbaum, all rights reservedRB: So what is your response to that?
SN: Well, to be overwhelmed, for one thing.
RB: [laughs] It stops there? You go, “Oh, I’m overwhelmed.”
SN: [laughs] My first response is to be overwhelmed; my second is to envy people like Susan Sontag, who had this enormous capacity to take it all in and who never narrowed her interests as she grew older, the way other people do, who was always open to everything, who spent all day and evening seeing everything and listening to everything, and reading everything. And for whom it was never enough. She was always interested and curious, always ready to look at the next thing. So, there’s envy of that. And then really just trying to keep up. If you are a novelist you need to pay attention to the culture. So it’s part of your job to take in as much as you can. And it’s a challenge, it really is. There are probably 400 favorites—there are so many great songs—
RB: I was looking for a reasonable number that didn’t trivialize the word “favorite.” Also, in regard to this particular appliance, I can keep changing my favorites. On my desktop I have 7,500 sound files. Which reduces to about a third of that on my mp3 player and additionally I got my son—he’s nine—a Shuffle that stores 250 files. So far he’s only identified 100 songs that he wants access to. What I want to get to in addition to being in touch with the culture, so you can grasp context and background—as you repeat in Naked Sleeper, “Background is everything.”
SN: As a novelist, you do want to keep track of everything that’s going on.
If you are a novelist you need to pay attention to the culture. So it’s part of your job to take in as much as you can. And it’s a challenge, it really is. RB: In the case of your five novels—do you remember them?
SN: I’m often surprised in what I have forgotten in them. For example, I have been trying to improve my German—so I said, “I know what I will do, I’ll read my own books in German. I will know a certain amount, which will help me, and my mind prints are all in them, which will help me to understand them and it’ll help my vocabulary and help get a sense of the structure of the language.” So I’ve been reading Naked Sleeper in German and I am surprised in what I have forgotten. The book came out in 1996. I remember a great deal, of course, but I have forgotten quite a bit. Which is actually all right with me except for the fear of repeating—which is bound to happen. I’m not going to read my own books to make sure—
RB: What might you repeat, situations, a character?
SN: No. A remark, an observation, maybe a name. Above all an observation of some kind, something I might have a character think or say that was already said by a character in an earlier book. That’s my fear. And you’d look foolish if you did that but—
RB: Maybe not, some things are worth repeating. [laughs]
SN: That might be, but I think you would look foolish if you inadvertently used something you’d already used in another book. But being a writer you have to accept that you are going to look foolish now and then.
RB: As opposed to other occupations that guard you from looking foolish.
SN: I mean in print.
RB: Speaking of the 10-year-old Naked Sleeper, do you have any interest in seeing where the characters went, what happened to them or the children in the story?
SN: That’s a very interesting question. The truth is, I have never cared what happens to my characters after I finish the book.
RB: I’m surprised—I assume that the writer invests so much in the characters, making them alive and vivid, that they care about them—
SN: Yes.
RB: So it seems odd that once the book ends you no longer care.
SN: Well, it’s not really that I don’t care about them but that the story that I set out to tell is over and I don’t find myself thinking about their fates after that last page. I really don’t. I can’t think of any character that I have written about that I later thought about the life of that character after the story I tell. I’m not sure why. It’s interesting—
RB: It’s interesting to me because I recall a number of novels that authors went back to, continued though the writers claim they never intended to carry the story forward. The most prominent of these is Richard Ford and his Frank Bascombe trilogy. Julian Barnes did the same thing with the couple from Talking It Over, revisiting them some 10 years later in Love, Etc. I’d bet there are other writers who have asked themselves what happened to a character years down the line. I don’t think Fredrick Busch intended to continue the story in Girls.
SN: That’s probably true. In most cases the writer didn’t know. Somehow that character returned and tugged at the writer’s sleeve and said, “Well I’m back. Deal with me.” I have to say I would be totally surprised if I were to return to any of the characters that I have written about.
I can’t think of any character that I have written about that I later thought about the life of that character after the story I tell. RB: Nona and Roy are left in such an interesting pregnant situation.
SN: Right, they are in a completely new life situation and you want to know how she is going to cope, that’s true. And yet when I now—since you have put this before me and I am thinking about them and actually I am seeing them—I have to say that that novel, which would be about their life with these children that they have adopted—
RB: No longer in New York City, to Minnesota?
SN: The idea of writing a novel—when I try to think about how it would be—it would be a novel about their marriage and the children, and I can see it doesn’t interest me.
RB: Because you have said everything that you wanted to say about them?
SN: I’d say because I feel that the issues I deal with have been fully explored by the end of the book. Also, I guess there’s something about the desire to leave some things open at the end, for the reader to imagine. Some people will think, “Well, they may have decided to stay together but I don’t believe they’re going to be happy.” And other people will say, “Well, Nona finally did the right thing and she and Roy are going to be happy.” I would prefer that both possibilities could exist—
RB: That’s not what I think. I wouldn’t presume to take on the novelist’s task and imagine a further story. All the possibilities are there—I wouldn’t speculate this or that. Why would I?
SN: I do think some readers will do that. They’ll make a judgment and the characters will have decided to do something—it will be the end of the book and some character will decide, “Yes, I’m going to do this.” Let’s say—how about Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester—were [laughs] they happy? Brontë has led you to this point where that is absolutely what you are supposed to assume about that story, but we would bring to it all kinds of other things. And we can imagine something. Would you want to read a book, even if it were by Brontë, about how Jane—
RB: Let me put it to you this way—I rarely think a story that I am enjoying is too long.
SN: I agree.
RB: So, in a sense, a sequel is an arbitrary division. It could have just been packed into the one volume. And also, I enjoy someone like William Kennedy or Faulkner, who will create—or Susan Straight—an imagined community. And in a very original way Edward Jones does that. Although not in an obvious way.
SN: Yes, that idea appeals to me more, though. That there would be a community created and then you are dealing with this part of it, this couple, this family of this community and then in an another book you focus on minor or peripheral characters from the first book.
RB: So you could see attending to the [orphaned] children that Roy and Nona adopt [in Naked Sleeper]?
SN: Yes, then you go on and deal with other characters. That would be interesting but isn’t that like Zola—I haven’t read Zola in years—
There you are, 17 or 18 years old, and you are going away from home for the first time and there is a lot at stake and you are very sensitive and vulnerable and all these things and there is this total stranger and you are told to live with them in a very intimate situation, that’s like an arranged marriage. RB: I never have. I am now embarrassed.
SN: He wrote a series of novels that deal with several generations of the same family.
RB: What do you begin with when you write a story? Do you write short stories?
SN: I have written some but not many. I always start with a character. There is an idea about a character or two. It’s less what would I like to write about than who. So my first book, which didn’t start out as a book—the idea was I wanted to write about my father. I wrote about my father in the last line of that chapter or what would turn into a chapter, called “Chang” in Feather on the Breath of God. I wrote, “It would be so much harder to write about my mother.” That’s when I knew I was going to go on. Later that was not the right sentence to end that chapter—I had a better ending to “Chang,” and so that sentence had to go—but as soon as I wrote that sentence I knew what was coming next. So I knew I wanted to write about my mother and father in that first book. In the second book I knew I wanted to write about Nona, and in my third book I knew I wanted to write about Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s marmoset. But the marmoset, Mitz, was an excuse to write about “the Wolves,” as their friends called them. And then I knew absolutely I wanted to write about a woman who had served as an army nurse in Vietnam—I had been interested in that for years.
RB: Because?
SN: I came of age during the Vietnam War and knew certain things about it, but not much, it turns out. And then in the ‘80s, when people who’d been there started talking and writing about it, there were some women among them. There wasn’t very much about the women, but I happened to read some of it and I thought, “This is something I’d really like to write about. A woman who lived through such an amazing experience, which only a handful of women had experienced.” And no one appeared to be writing any fiction about these women. So that’s how I ended up writing For Rouenna. And with this latest book, The Last of Her Kind, I knew I wanted to write about freshman roommates—that is an experience that we all take for granted, that nevertheless when you examine it is really pretty strange. That there you are, 17 or 18 years old, and you are going away from home for the first time and there is a lot at stake and you are very sensitive and vulnerable and all these things and there is this total stranger and you are told to live with them in a very intimate situation, that’s like an arranged marriage. And so I knew I wanted to write about girls in that situation. But I also wanted to write about that era, the late ‘60s. So I decided to put them on the Columbia campus at the same time I was there. So all my ideas for books have started out with characters. And once you decide who you want to write about obviously your character has to have a life, and you have to give them things to do and thoughts to think and relationships to have and so on. And a lot of my work really could be described as fictional biography. I like the idea of covering a large number of years in a character’s life. I am fascinated by the various turns a person’s life can end up taking over a period of time. That’s what I like to write about.
RB: So is that fun?
SN: Much of it is fun and satisfying. And in many ways—if the work is going well or well enough—and I do think, I tell my students this and actually meant it, I do think in many ways it does get easier. Much of it gets easier.
When writers say that it doesn’t get easier what they mean is that is that it is always hard. That writing is always hard. RB: Really?
SN: Yes, in the sense that you pick up your mistakes earlier as you are writing. And you are more alert to certain pitfalls.
RB: How about the part where you worry whether your audience will like what you are doing or whether you can deliver on what you began?
SN: Well, that’s not about writing, that’s about publishing.
RB: [laughs]
SN: What I meant was that the writing gets easier; you become more skillful unless something is wrong. And you waste less time. I can remember this and I see it in my students—this idea that I have spent all these hours, days, even weeks, on these pages, on this story, they must be good. Well, the truth is that it is quite possible that they aren’t. It doesn’t matter that you spent all this time on it. It still might not work. And after you have done this for a while, you are much more willing, much smarter, you know, to throw that away. You have to realize that that’s part of the process and not this big waste. You are able to say that won’t work and cut it. Whether it’s a sentence, a paragraph, a page or a whole story or chapter, you learn how to tell sooner when it’s not working. And you begin to feel more confident because you know you’re more skillful as a writer. But when it’s working, when the actual writing is going well and you know you’re doing a good day’s work, that’s enormously satisfying. And in that sense it is fun.
RB: What I hear you saying or that it suggests is that some people can keep those thoughts in the foreground, that is, a focus on the skills that they should have accumulated, so they can accelerate dealing with their mistakes and some people seem to start fresh with every project.
SN: True.
RB: No real explanation for that—just individual character.
SN: But I don’t know if you start fresh again each time—
RB: How to explain writers who say it doesn’t get easier? And that every start is fraught with angst.
SN: When writers say that it doesn’t get easier what they mean is that it is always hard. That writing is always hard. I interviewed Paula Fox at Symphony Space and I quoted something from an interview that I had read of hers with her—she writes children’s fiction, fiction and now these two memoirs—and people want to know what the difference was between the genres? The main thing she said, “It’s all hard.” In that sense it doesn’t get easier—
RB: It can be fun yet still hard?
SN: Part of it is—I wanted to be a dancer when I was young. And I failed at that. I have never gotten over that. I’ll never get over that.
RB: Meaning you feel badly about yourself? A failure?
SN: I don’t know how else to put it except to say that I wanted to be a dancer and I failed at that and I’ll never get over that. The thing is, there I am, a young person, a kid, studying ballet, and ballet is extremely difficult. It’s enormously difficult but there isn’t any dancer who wouldn’t say it isn’t fun. It’s more fun than anything could be. So in that sense to me, early on, the idea of something being incredibly difficult and physically painful certainly didn’t mean it couldn’t be the most fun and the most satisfying thing a person could do. I don’t think it’s a terrible thing that I will never get over it. I don’t see why I would get over it. Something that was so important to me I was not able to do, that I lost. It makes all the sense in the world that I would always have that.
Say you’re young and you fall in love with someone, and then you lose that person. Though you move on you don’t ever completely get over it. That loss is part of your life and who you are forever. RB: It is accurate to say writing was a substitute for—
SN: No, I was a writer first. Maybe I feel like [laughs] if only I had been able to dance I would have saved myself from becoming a writer. When I was a kid, like most writers I know, I wanted to write and wrote these stories about animals and children and so on. And when I was a little older I prided myself on my ridiculous sentimental colorful—but then when I was about 12 and I started thinking about ballet and then a little bit later started studying it—I started too late as a ballet dancer. I didn’t actually start until I was in high school though it was in my mind before that. And then I went off to college and went to Barnard—I chose Barnard because it was in Manhattan and I thought, “Well, I don’t want to go to college, no dancer goes to college, this is ridiculous, but I will choose Barnard because I can continue to study on 57th Street,” where I studied. Almost immediately upon arriving at Barnard almost everything seemed to fall apart; not only did I stop taking [ballet] classes, I also didn’t go to my academic classes. I was just a little wreck.
RB: What year was that?
SN: 1968. Eventually I continued to take dance classes at Barnard—it had and has a very good dance department. But the dream of being a dancer was never real. I would have had to have started much earlier. It was something I could do—but that doesn’t mean that I could have had a good career at it.
RB: Does it weigh you down?
SN: No—
RB: So it’s a biographical detail that you keep in mind, but what’s its impact? That you have tasted disappointment?
SN: No, its impact is partly that I was a dancer.
RB: That simple.
SN: I still have that in me. I know I know what it is to dance and to be a dancer. But what I feel is probably close to other kinds of loss. Like say you’re young and you fall in love with someone, and then you lose that person. And you go on and love other people and have a life and so on, but you know that that person was the one you loved the most, and that you’ll never love like that again. And though you move on you don’t ever completely get over it. That loss is part of your life and who you are forever.
RB: Do you go to dance performances?
SN: Not as much as I used to. But yes, I am a huge dance fan. I live in a city where there is a lot of dance.
RB: What does the body of your work mean to you now? Five novels, and I will assume that you are working on one now.
SN: I am—
RB: So do you even think about what you have written before, other than not wanting to repeat?
SN: Not much. I think it’s very interesting how little it actually concerns me. I don’t know how other writers feel. I mean, the books I’ve published, I don’t think about them much. I don’t think that’s uncommon, though. It’s almost as if the only book you really think and care about is the one that you’re working on. People occasionally say your books must be like—
RB:—children.
SN: Nothing can be farther from the truth. The idea would be you had five children and only cared about the one you were [laughs] pregnant with. Or that was just born. You could care less about the others. I don’t think it’s like having children at all.
By the time I am ready to make progress on a longer work I am already at a point at which I know I am going to stick with it. I have never worked for a year on a novel that I thought I was going to finish and have ended up having to drop it. RB: There seems always to be a search for the appropriate metaphor for the things that we create. There must be a good reason for the French word oeuvre not being translated into English. It doesn’t strike me that American writers are occupied with the bodies of their works.
SN: Maybe some of them do. I wonder if it’s perhaps different for musicians, for composers. Or for painters. Whether it’s more likely for them to see their work in terms of a body of work. I have no idea.
RB: I was rereading a piece about science being progressive but the arts are not—meaning that they don’t build on themselves. And she was trying to figure out whether philosophy was progressive. So it’s the case that writing fiction is not progressive.
SN: No, I don’t think of it as progressive. You certainly don’t get better and better in that sense. There are plenty of writers whose early works are stronger than their later ones. Or the later work can still be very good but have more problems and weaknesses than early work. For novelists in particular, it’s not uncommon for success to be followed by failure.
RB: There are glorious or grand failures. Have you started something and not finished or something you finished that was not what you wanted and you put it in a drawer?
SN: I have work that I have tried to do that hasn’t worked out. Not even in a drawer.
RB: Hard drive?
SN: Not even—in the garbage. [laughs] On the other hand I don’t—by the time I am ready to make progress on a longer work I am already at a point at which I know I am going to stick with it. I have never worked for a year on a novel that I thought I was going to finish and have ended up having to drop it.
RB: Is that what it takes, a year? Is there a normal time frame for writing a book?
SN: No, what I meant by a year was that by that time I would be—it takes about two years. I don’t write very, very long novels. The Last of Her Kind was 375 pages, and that’s my longest book. And that took more than two years.
RB: Is that your most well-reviewed, well-attended book?
SN: It was. It received more attention than my first book.
RB: Do you read those reviews? I noticed there was quite a variety of venues—from the women’s magazines to the Wall Street Journal.
SN: I feel very lucky with the reviews that that book got. There were some very good reviews.
RB: I did like Elizabeth Benedict’s in the New York Times.
SN: Me, too.
RB: It was well written and hit the right notes.
SN: I was thrilled with it. It was in the daily Times and also, I agree, it was well written and generous. When I was young I remember hearing about writers who said they didn’t read their own reviews. I remember thinking, “I don’t know if I believe that. That seems so strange. How could you not read your reviews?” But when I started publishing I discovered that nothing could be easier than not reading reviews, and that in fact one had to force oneself to read them. Because even the good ones can make you cringe. I do read my reviews, but now I understand perfectly why some people don’t, or don’t want to. And sometimes what I’ll do is put off reading them. I’ll collect them and wait for the right moment and then sit down and read them all, getting it all over with at once.
More novelists isn’t exactly what the world needs right now. RB: Among other things, you have the good fortune to continue to be published, which is one of the fears that writers have about not getting reviewed.
SN: Exactly.
RB: Do you look at what you do as being important?
SN: Not as much as I would wish. In fact, I don’t think it has great importance. I very often wish I were doing work that would give me the sense of doing something more important. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write about the combat nurse, someone whose work was saving lives. I can’t say my writing makes a big difference to the world, to the lives of people beyond myself. And I feel some regret about this, because you only have one life, and I very often wish I were engaged in some enterprise that was more meaningful—
RB: That made the world better?
SN: For example, once when I was at McDowell there was another resident there, a visual artist whose husband was an agricultural scientist, and one night at dinner she told us about his work—he was involved in trying to develop ways to produce hardier crops, which could help reduce famine in certain parts of the world—and as soon as I heard this I said, “How I wish I were doing something like that with my life!” Which did not go over well at that table.
RB: [laughs]
SN: People said things like, Art is just as meaningful, just as important, and so on and on. I’m not saying they were wrong. But I certainly didn’t feel that way.
RB: Could anything be more self-serving than artists saying how important their work is and art is?
SN: They weren’t saying how important their work was.
RB: Yes they were.
SN: [laughs] Well, man doesn’t live by bread alone. Fine, there just seems to be less and less bread. If it were a different world—
RB: If you go by the numbers and you see how few people pay attention to the sum total of all that artists create—
Nunez, by Birnbaum, all rights reservedSN: Here’s the main thing: I feel I put my fiction out there, all fine and good. But there’s lots of fiction out there. There are a lot of good books. There are a lot of great stories. There are all these good writers; I know many of them myself. There is all this great literature already on the shelves. So, no, I can’t possibly feel as if I were doing something extraordinarily important. And the more you read the news, the more alarmed you are at what’s happening in the world, and it’s quite hard to be working as an artist and to think of that as being the most valuable contribution to society you could make. More novelists isn’t exactly what the world needs right now.
RB: Why do you think writing programs have exploded so much in the last generation? Why do so many people want to write?
SN: I’m not sure. I think about that all the time. It is certainly not for the money—they must know that writers don’t make a lot of money.
RB: Most don’t make any money.
SN: Right, but of course if you enter these programs there is a fantasy that you will be the big literary star. Sometimes I worry that for certain people this is a culture totally obsessed with fame and for certain people they have this idea that it is the only way they can become famous. They know they are not going to be a supermodel or get up on the stage and sing La Traviata.
RB: There is American Idol.
SN: Right. They are not going to write a great song and they can’t make visual art. But they feel that because everyone writes, and because they like to read, they had some idea that that is something they can do and it will get sold and published and that would make them feel all right. That’s what it is—it’s about the fact that everyone can write and they don’t think of it in the same way as people think about dancing or even sport. With writing they think—
RB: Everyone assumes there is a base level of competence at writing that they can improve—
SN: They do, they do. And that they have a story. I agree with that part: They do have a story. When they read other peoples’ stories, if the writing is good, it strikes them as effortless. And they get the idea that all they have to do is get in touch with their own inner writer and it will all come pouring out. Many people believe that, given enough time and lots of encouragement, they can write a novel, too, and that someone will want to publish it, and that lots of people will want to read it.
RB: Is there a noticeable change in your writing students—do you teach regularly?
SN: I teach fairly often. I don’t have a position. I do adjunct teaching—quite a bit. I taught at Columbia, undergraduate and the MFA program, Amherst, Smith, and the New School, Hofstra, and I’ve been a visiting writer at Washington University, Sarah Lawrence, and then I’ve done some of these conferences. And at the poetry center at the 92nd Street Y. Those are all different kinds of students. Different ages. So what was your question?
RB: Is there something about the students that has changed?
SN: The first time I ever taught was at Hofstra in ‘93. People participating workshops are getting better all the time. But all this workshopping and people paying attention to the craft of writing has had an effect.
RB: But there is a backlash that argues that the fiction has become sterile and antiseptic and incestuous, and the stories are written to satisfy a certain benchmark—
SN: Yeah, there is such a thing as a workshop story. And I do see a lot of that. But it also depends whether it’s undergraduates or MFA students or people who take these workshops at the 92nd Street Poetry center—who are of any age. Gary Shteyngart was a student of mine at the poetry center. He was 27 at the time, and he was working on that first novel that became The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.
RB: We talked before about how you don’t refer back to your work much—and yet here you are, ostensibly on tour for a novel that you must have completed two or three years ago. So what does that feel like?
SN: I don’t know how it feels, exactly. It feels like business. [both laugh] It feels like what happens when a book comes out.
RB: Is it difficult for you to tear yourself away from your current work?
SN: Yes, but on the other hand I wouldn’t really want to talk about that novel, which is just in its earliest stage. And so in a way it’s interesting to talk about The Last of Her Kind at this point, a year after it was published, a year and three months after I handed it in.
RB: When authors go on tour for their books, I think the audience that comes to readings for the most part hasn’t read the book. But going out on tour for the soft cover, there is a good chance some or most of the audience has read the book.
Even if a book were thrilling, I would still rather hear the author talking and answering questions. I can read—I don’t need you to read to me.SN: It’s true. It’s more interesting. In this bookstore in Kingston, Pa., The Tudor Bookstore, most of the people had read the book and the questions were very interesting. And also now there are book clubs—now I am in touch and talking with book clubs. But yes, it really is more interesting to talk to people who have read the book—the best part of any of these meetings or readings or whatever—it’s never the reading—
RB: For sure.
SN: Authors should read a little bit but talk a little bit more about the book, anticipating some of the questions that people will want to know. For example, “Why did you write this book? What is this book about?”
RB: As opposed to “How do you get an agent?” or “Do you use a computer or write longhand?”
SN: Exactly. So you begin by reading a very few pages and then asking for questions. And then it can become quite lively.
RB: It’s surprising that more readings haven’t adopted what is done in Europe—which is to have an interlocutor or interviewer talk to the visiting writer in front of an audience.
SN: We need more variety. For example, last month I did an event with Gary Shteyngart at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum—he’s written about immigrants, and I have written about immigrants. And we each read for five minutes. There was a moderator and we talked and then there were questions and it was terrific and much more interesting than it would have been if I had read for a half-hour and Gary read for a half-hour—Gary is one of the funniest writers around, so it is great fun to hear him read. But it was just much more interesting, and the audience questions and the discussion and getting more than one writer who has a book out at the same time—but just the minimal number of pages just to get a flavor of the book and then the talk—it so much better and interesting. I don’t enjoy going to readings.
RB: Amen. Though occasionally someone will do well, Charles Baxter and Jim Shepard come to mind.
SN: I have heard Charles at Bread Loaf. Colum McCann is very good. When he reads, he has his own special way of doing it.
RB: Those Irish guys have a gift. [laughs]
SN: But even if a book were thrilling, I would still rather hear the author talking and answering questions. I can read—I don’t need you to read to me.
RB: There is something to be said for getting the tone or coloration through an author’s reading.
SN: A bit. The standard thing, the standard book tour reading—it’s often not so conducive to discussion. The audience feels like they’re there to listen to a reading, and they aren’t prepared to ask questions. Whereas if it were more like “I’m here to discuss my book but before I do I will read just a few pages,” that would be different. And as I say, maybe it’s better when it’s more than one writer.
RB: It has gotten mechanical and pro forma. Writers are being thrown out there left and right. I imagine that the skies of America on any given day are full of literary minds. Anyway, is there a movie to be made of The Last of Her Kind?
SN: It’s been optioned.
RB: So is a movie going to be made?
SN: That I don’t know. I hope so. Nothing is in production now.
RB: Was it optioned by someone who read it?
SN: Indeed, and he said, “I will be totally honest with you, it wasn’t a review that made me think of reading this book, I was in a bookstore …and the cover of the book made me interested.” That pleased me because I found that Eggleston photo myself.
RB: The picture of the two girls?
SN: It’s from the ‘70s. I forget what stage I was in with the book. I wasn’t finished yet. And there was this photo from Memphis and I clipped it—I had this idea that Farrar Straus could work with it because it seemed right. And then I went off to Berlin in January 2005 and sent it to my editor [Jonathan Galassi] at Farrar Straus and then I didn’t hear anything and time passed and I knew the book was being put together and I inquired and he said they were working with it. And the next thing I got the mockup of the cover, and people have responded well to that image. And they used it on the soft cover because Picador also really liked it. And it’s from the right era, and when you look at it you don’t know who’s who. I just like it. It’s beautiful. When it was published in Italy they said, “We also want to use the cover,” and they rarely use the same image.
RB: Any interest in your earlier novels?
SN: None of them. This was the first time. Who knows? I don’t know how these things work.
RB: People who are supposed to know how they work don’t know how they work.
SN: Yeah, yeah. We’ll see what happens. Many things get optioned and few things get made. Jawal Nga is the producer who got in touch with me and optioned the book. I’ve met with him twice, and I really like the way he talked about the book and his ideas for a film version.
RB: I took the hint that you don’t really want to talk about what you are working on now.
SN: I’ll just say it’s a new novel that I began writing in October. I was away at this wonderful place called Ucross, in Wyoming. It’s the first book of mine in which the main character is not female. And I have a contract now, and it’s due in about two years.
RB: Good, I hope to see you then.

Copyright © The Morning News LLC
An Interview with Sigrid Nunez
This summer I picked up Sigrid Nunez’s The Last Of Her Kind and began reading it. Published in 2006 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, it begins with the unforgettable line, “We had been living together for about a week when my roommate told me she had asked specifically to be paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own.” What follows is a novel about two Barnard women, Ann and Georgette. Georgette, the narrator, tells the story of her life and of Ann’s: Ann goes on to be the sort of sixties bomb-throwing radical who reappeared amid the other ghosts of the sixties in our most recent presidential campaign. The novel is a profound, intimate take on the cultural events of the time that are still generating our most important political questions in this country, and it does its unwittingly timely work with a masterful authority.
Sigrid Nunez has published five novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, and The Last of Her Kind. Her work has also appeared in two Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature. Nunez is the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Award for best novel of the year, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. She was the 2000–2001 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome, and in 2003, she was elected as a Literature Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In spring 2005, she was the Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and she is a 2006 fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Nunez currently lives in New York City.
The day I met Sigrid Nunez, I was at a cocktail party for Picador authors and booksellers at the 2002 Book Expo of America in New York City. I remember standing in a crowded bar somewhere to the left of Hell’s Kitchen, and counting off the literary boldface names: Jamaica Kincaid, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham, and, as I saw her through the distance, Sigrid Nunez, among others. Sigrid went out of her way to make me feel at ease that day, which made her my hero, and our friendship began then. When I was asked to interview an author for this issue, I thought of her and The Last of Her Kind instantly. The conversations that became this interview took place over e-mail and the telephone this fall.
* * *
This week, I’m thinking a lot about Ezra Pound’s idea of the American intelligence, an intelligence composed of many cultures and resulting in new and unexpected outcomes. It’s something Guy Davenport took up most recently, that I’ve seen, and it did capture my imagination before I knew of his fascist life, when I was in high school and I read the Cantos. His poetry, to my mind, was the first literary cultural artifact to somehow try to represent the way I felt inside, which was made of all of these places people thought were irreconcilable. Did you have moments like this growing up, and how did they affect you as a writer? I ask you this because you seem to have reconciled them powerfully. You strike me as a woman and a writer with a very sure sense of herself.
These are hard questions to answer. I can remember, when I was growing up, having a strong response to any kind of writing I thought was beautiful or meaningful or exciting. I read a lot, I spent a lot of time at the library, and I had a few good, perceptive teachers who encouraged me to read more than what was assigned in class.
I’m not used to thinking of myself as someone who is sure of herself, except perhaps in the sense that I always wanted to be a writer and I did become one. And the older I got, the more time I spent writing and the more ruthless I was about cutting out whatever was not writing or did not feed the writing, meaning, for the most part, reading. I’ve never been the kind of person who wants to do many things; I always wanted to do only one thing. I’m not even capable of doing more than one thing well. Of course this has meant having to give up a lot, and missing out on some of the best things in life. But I grew up believing not only that you can’t have it all but that, in my case, you could not have much.
As you put together your own literary sensibility, looking back, were there writers whose lives spoke to you powerfully, in addition to their work? And how much did you follow their lead, if at all?
I think, to some degree or other, all writers’ lives speak to me. Because of course all writers, big and small, face similar problems and share similar concerns. That’s why I always tell my students they should read as many volumes of writers’ journals, memoirs, letters, autobiographies, and biographies as possible. It is helpful, it is even comforting, to observe a genius like Virginia Woolf confronting every aspect of the literary life from how to solve a particular problem in a novel in progress, to the right attitude towards negative criticism, to her competitive feelings towards a fellow writer like Katherine Mansfield, to how to cope with the dogs next door barking when she was trying to work. I do think Woolf’s life, as revealed in her own life-writing and in various biographies, has had as much influence on me as her fiction. And of course that has everything to do with the fact that she was a woman, and that she concerned herself a great deal with what it meant to be a writer of fiction and a woman.
There was a time in my life when I felt more in common with other people of mixed heritage than I did with people who were white or Korean. I remember concluding that in order to be mixed and to survive you had to be beautiful, or intelligent, or very strong, or some combination thereof, and it made me a little afraid. What was it like for you growing up of mixed parentage? For me, as a kid, I went to science fiction. I made common cause with creatures of magic or accidents of science.
I didn’t turn to science fiction as a kid, but I did turn to fiction. I mean, the love of stories and the impulse towards storytelling began very early. And then, when I was a little older, I turned to ballet. But who can say this had anything necessarily to do with being the child of a mixed couple? I don’t think it’s possible to know. But you’re asking such a big question. Is it okay if I answer by mentioning A Feather on the Breath of God? I think I said everything I have to say about growing up the child of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father, both of whom happened also to be American immigrants, in that first book.
A friend of mine and I were discussing how we each overidentified with Obama—I had been talking about how my mom had overidentified with Hillary. When I thought of asking you this question, the interesting thing to me was I had no idea who you might have overidentified with, so to speak.
I was for Hillary, but not because I overidentified with her. I was for Hillary because I thought she was the best-qualified candidate for the job. Among other things, I thought she was the most likely to succeed in reforming our dysfunctional healthcare system. I guess I was one of those people who dreamed of a Hillary presidency followed by an Obama presidency.
People keep talking about “what happened.” What do you think happened? It really does seem like a miracle. And the celebrations around the world were moving, though they also seemed to speak to how the whole world was holding its breath.
That word “miracle”! We keep hearing it, along with “dream come true,” because that’s exactly how it felt. My own first thought was: We have overcome. Speaking of worldwide rejoicing, did you hear that, after the election, Kenya declared a national holiday? Even we didn’t get that! This is the only time in my life I’ve ever spent an election night celebrating. Of course, there was also a tremendous sense of relief. Catastrophe averted! And aside from all the excitement about falling racial barriers, there was that other miracle to savor: this time, the superior candidate won.
This summer, I was reading The Last of Her Kind and as I did, the RNC and the McCain campaign were busy trying to tie Bill Ayers to Obama. I kept feeling like I was reading something just under the surface of the campaign’s noise, and I kept wanting to write to ask you about it. Now that I have the chance, what did you think about all of that?
I thought that was ridiculous. I’ve read Ayers’s memoir, Fugitive Days, which I liked a lot—it’s a fascinating book. I read it as part of my research. His book came out immediately before 9/11, and I think it would have gotten a lot of attention if it had come out at some other time. Anyway, I knew what he’d been doing with his life since his radical days—teaching and working for education reform. But the claim that Obama and Ayers were close associates was never anything more than a scare tactic born of Republican desperation. Nobody besides a handful of right-wingers bought the crazy idea that Obama’s career was launched in Ayers’s living room.
Did it surprise you that nobody bought it?
No, because the tactic was so obvious. There was no story there. They were never good friends and even if they had been, there wouldn’t have been any threat to worry about. As he says himself, Ayers was responsible for some reckless and idiotic behavior in his youth, when Obama was a little boy. But he certainly doesn’t represent any threat to anyone, and in any case he never had the connection to Obama that some shameless people wanted us to believe.
“Idiotic behavior in his youth” brings us, I think, back to the novel. The last time we spoke, we talked about “Mad Men,” the TV show, and I wondered if it felt to you like it was about what happened right before the events in The Last of Her Kind. What is it like for you, seeing that show?
What I like about “Mad Men” is the wonderful way it illuminates the era leading up to the era I was writing about. The early sixties are a lot hazier to me than the late sixties. And of course, because I was a little kid then, I was living in a tiny protected world, and so I had no real knowledge of what making a life for yourself was like. What’s so interesting is watching the characters suffer from the kinds of discrimination and social restrictions that made the huge liberating changes of the sixties inevitable. Watching the series you get a really good idea of how radically different life in the early sixties was from life just a few years later.
So, it’s sort of like the show’s characters are the generation that babysat for the generation that dropped out.
I’ve always thought it must have been hard, around ’68, to be still young but closer to thirty than to twenty. You might have been only twenty-five, say, but you already had a serious job and a family. You couldn’t just let your hair grow and drop out, though of course some older people did do that. And a lot of them looked pretty foolish to younger people, as I recall, because we didn’t think of them as young, and as we said then: Don’t trust anyone over thirty. But I always felt sorry for those people who were only a little older than I was but didn’t get to be part of this very exciting and liberating so-called youth quake. Those of us who were still in our teens got to extend our childhoods and put off all kinds of adult responsibilities for years. I knew a lot of people back then who fell into the category I’m talking about, who felt very frustrated and thwarted about having been “born too late.” And some of the characters in “Mad Men” seem that way to me, too. All these thwarted lives.
Could you talk about the birth of The Last of Her Kind a bit?
It was 2001 and I was teaching at Smith. I’d just started the book when 9/11 happened. Then, like everyone else, I stared at the wall for quite some time, and then I wrote about sixty pages and got a contract and came back to New York and finished it.
Was there something that happened at Smith that inspired The Last of Her Kind?
Yes. Not exactly something specific that happened, but I’m sure my first two semesters at Smith (I taught there four semesters, with a year-long break in between) got me thinking back to my own undergraduate years. Also, I’d just finished For Rouenna, so I was still steeped in the era of Vietnam and the sixties. Someone at Smith taught a mini-course on the sixties and I sat in on it. It was a large class, and I could tell everything was new to the students, they’d never heard this stuff before, and they were completely transfixed. My own students told me things they remembered their parents saying to them, things I put in my book: “You call Desert Storm a war? We had Vietnam.” Or: “The LSD we took was so much stronger than what’s out there today.” That sort of thing. One student wrote a story in which a character says that at first she was proud her parents were hippies but later she was embarrassed. And another student said, “Oh, I hate hippies,” and I remember thinking: I wonder what she means by “hippies.”
I’d meet some of their parents and wonder how much they told their kids about their own college days. Most of the people I knew back then who ended up having kids didn’t want them to know about all the drugs they’d taken or all the sleeping around that went on, which is of course understandable. But there was so much in that book that I thought everyone knew and that I later discovered many young people didn’t know at all. While I was writing I kept asking myself, how much do I have to explain? Won’t it be a big bore if I explain everything? But it turns out a lot of references I thought everyone would get weren’t exactly common knowledge.
Like what?
Like “Smash Monogamy.”
What is that?
Just what it sounds like. It was an anti-marriage slogan. It went with Free Love. From what I can tell, people my age have forgotten it and younger people have never heard of it. In fact, I hadn’t thought about Smash Monogamy in years, until it occurred to me while I was writing the book. A lot of things like that came back to me, and I thought, were we really like that? Did we really say and think all those silly things? Like our extraordinary hostility to the idea of a wedding. For a while, weddings were completely out. The very idea of anyone wanting to have a big bourgeois wedding, with the white dress and all. Who would do that? Totally uncool. And the idea of an engagement ring, it was just tacky, tacky, tacky. Like drinking martinis.
I don’t remember when that changed, probably sometime in the seventies.
By which you mean forgetting?
I mean starting to have big weddings again.
And martinis.
Yes, weddings and martinis.
I think it’s in Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being where he mentions how it came to be considered uptight and uncool for people to make love in the dark. Supposedly before the sixties people always had sex with the lights out, and supposedly our generation changed that. I do remember people making fun of other people for not leaving the lights on during sex. Or for not undressing completely before having sex.
I’ve heard from people who say they’ve given their kids—their adult kids, I mean—my book—
That’s their way of telling them about the sixties?
Yes. They say it was such a strange, strange time, and it’s so hard to explain, and this is a way for them to let their kids know what it was like.
For example, when I was eighteen my boyfriend and I went to live for a short time on a commune in the Catskills. And one day this guy who also lived there walked in on us when we were in bed. And instead of saying what you might expect, like, Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry, he just stood there with a look of grave disappointment on his face and said, “Oh, wow, man. You guys leave your underwear on?” You have to understand, though, this was not unusual. This guy wasn’t crazy. He was just so sad to catch us doing something uncool and bourgeois. No problem with the lights, at least, because it was the middle of the day. And hey, now that I think of it, how much underwear could it have been, since no one wore a bra in those days? But isn’t that hilarious?
It is, it’s hilarious. I think what comes forward is the way the novel is a kind of, not quite a correction, but an intervention, a way to really look at what happened, before it’s lost to this mix of retrospective embarrassment and the mythmaking of film and television, the way it all gets reduced to this cliché of a girl putting flowers in her hair and having sex with too many people. This novel strips off the kitsch and the faux naiveté in the way people deal with these things. For example, I don’t think the people who say they hate hippies have any idea of what it took to just walk away like that. Or why you would.
One of the reasons I wanted to write about that time was precisely because I’d always found it so difficult to understand. I remembered a lot, but it all seemed increasingly strange and remote and even inexplicable to me. But I had no desire to write about it as autobiography. I knew I could only get at the truth if I wrote about it from the outside, from the perspective of a character—Georgette George, as it turned out—whose experience of that time was very different from mine. People always assume that what you write about is true—
That it is just you, writing down “what happened,” and then changing the names.
Yes. People assume a lot of the time you’re just working from memory. But the thing is, I was at Woodstock, but when it came to writing my book I purposely had my characters miss Woodstock. On the other hand, I wasn’t at Altamont, but I have some characters go there and I describe the event in full detail. So that’s the thing. I knew I wanted to include a big rock concert in the story. But instead of writing, from memory, about the one I’d actually experienced, I chose instead to write about one for which I had to do a lot of research and make things up.
Can you say some more about that, push into that idea for a moment? Because I really agree with that.
I think it has everything to do with the desire to be engaged in inventing a story, rather than reporting a story—in other words, with what makes me want to write fiction in the first place. It just would not have been as interesting to me, as a writer, to write about my Woodstock experience. (As part of a novel, I mean; I have written about it as nonfiction, elsewhere.) It wouldn’t have been as interesting and it wouldn’t have been as much fun, and then there’s also the desire to take a risk, the risk of writing about what you don’t know. I think it’s similar to the impulse that makes people want to write historical novels. But of course it doesn’t have to be a story set in Paris in another century. It’s still the same impulse, there’s something that pulls you away from yourself and your own experiences. That delicious pull toward the unknown and the need to give full play to the imagination.
I wanted to ask you about Ann and Georgette, from The Last of Her Kind. About this relationship of theirs, what seemed to me to be the idea of two people who have a seemingly casual relationship and yet have an impact on each other that would last for their whole lives.
I don’t think anything Ann did in her life would have been different if in fact she had never met Georgette. That might be painful for Georgette to think about, but it’s true. She’s not really a significant influence on Ann. Ann’s the same person from the time before she meets Ann to the day she dies. It’s always the same corrosive class guilt, the same tendency to romanticize the poor, the same passionate hatred of social injustice, and the pathetic wish to have been born black. Ann’s an extreme version of a type that was very common back then. When she gets accepted to college, she asks—indirectly—for a poor, black roommate and ends up instead with a poor, white one: Georgette.
After I’d written that part of the book I read a profile of Howard Dean in The New Yorker and learned that when he went to Yale he specifically asked for a black roommate, and I believe he ended up with two. Like Ann, he came from a very privileged background and he wanted to mix with people from a completely different background. And of course, this kind of wish was something quite new then. In the book Georgette makes a joke about imagining someone asking for a roommate who’s white and rich.
Ann loves Georgette in many ways, above all the fact that Georgette comes from a disadvantaged background, but after two years or so she becomes bored with her, and she loses respect for her. In fact, as often happens, the two women outgrow each other. But someone like Ann isn’t likely to stay friends with a totally apolitical woman who loves her job working for a beauty editor at a women’s fashion magazine. And so they end up having a huge fight and going their separate ways.
Given that, why would you choose George to narrate this? What made her the right person for this?
I could never have written this book from Ann’s point of view. As I say, I knew it had to be written from the point of view of an outsider, someone who witnessed but did not fully participate in what we call “the sixties.” George is not a political radical, she’s not a hippie, or a runaway like her kid sister, she’s not a brain like Ann. She’s never at the top or the center of anything. She’s an ordinary person, not brilliant, not even particularly gifted. It’s not like she couldn’t have done more in her life, but she was not particularly ambitious. As she says, against the spirit of the times, all she really wanted with her whole heart was to have kids, and she does do that. She has the kind of life most people have. Most people don’t have spectacular things happen to them.
So why would she be the right person to tell this story? Well, besides being an outsider she’s also haunted by what she’s seen. She’s haunted by memories of the town where she grew up, by memories of her unhappy family, her whole background. And then she’s haunted by her time at Barnard, where she didn’t fit in and where she lost the one thing that had meant the most to her, her sense of herself as a budding poet. And she’s haunted by her complicated friendship with Ann, and how it went wrong, and of course by the terrible turn that Ann’s life ends up taking. And then she’s haunted by thoughts of Ann’s life behind bars. At some point it occurs to George that, though decades have passed, she has never stopped thinking about Ann. And she narrates the book in the tone of someone trying to understand what happened back then, and why it has always continued to haunt her.
And now, of course, the somewhat obvious question: do you have something coming out soon, and if so, what is it?
Not coming out, no. But I’m almost finished with my sixth novel, which should be published sometime in 2010. I know it won’t surprise you to hear that’s all I want to say about it right now.

At Work

Sigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag

April 4, 2011 | by Thessaly La Force
Susan Sontag in 1975, a year before she met Sigrid Nunez. © Estate of Peter Hujar.
In the spring of 1976, Sigrid Nunez went to the apartment of Susan Sontag, who was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help answer her mail. Nunez had just gotten her M.F.A. from Columbia and lived nearby to Sontag’s apartment at 340 Riverside Drive. On her third visit, Nunez met Sontag’s son, David Rieff, and shortly thereafter the two began dating. It wasn’t long before Nunez moved in, beginning what would be a complicated relationship with both Sontag and her son. Her memoir, Sempre Susan, chronicles those few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff. We sat down for coffee not too long ago at the City Bakery on 18th Street to talk about the book.
I was really struck by the line in the book where you say, “Exceptionalism: Was it really a good idea for the three of us, Susan, her son, myself to share the same household?” Was it?
Well, as it turned out, it was a very bad idea. But at the time there were various reasons that made it less crazy than it might have seemed. First of all, Susan had just recently been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. She was also in the middle of breaking up with the woman who’d been her partner for several years. She’d always hated living alone, but now she was frankly terrified, and she made it clear that she’d be devastated if David were to move out. Also, David was still in school at the time, and he was financially dependent on Susan.
I could see myself being excited about the idea of living with Susan Sontag, and being eager to experience the intimacy of a peculiar situation. Was part of you unconcerned about whether this was a good idea?
I was never not concerned about it, but the truth is I thought it was going to be temporary. In fact, in the book, I originally said this in so many words, but I ended up cutting that part because it sounded silly, like I was trying to make excuses. But the truth is, I figured once David finished school we’d move into a place of our own. As time passed, though, it became increasingly clear that Susan would do anything to keep David from moving out. And it wasn’t just a question of the three of us living under the same roof. Susan wanted the three of us to do everything together. As I say in the book, I can hardly remember times when David and I went out alone.
Left: Nunez and Sontag in 1977. Right: Rieff.
Was she forthcoming about the fact that she really just wanted to be with her son?
As she said often, defensively, “Why do we have to live like everyone else?” As far as she was concerned, there was nothing so damn great about the traditional nuclear family. In fact, she loathed the very idea of the nuclear family. And she pointed out that, in other cultures, an arrangement like ours would’ve been perfectly normal. Also, she always insisted that she and David were different from ordinary mothers and sons. She liked to think of herself as David’s “goofy older sister.” It wasn’t neediness that made her want to keep David with her, she’d tell people, but her enormous love for him.

You talk about how your writing changed after you had this experience with Susan. I was really taken by those passages where you describe her giving you changes and advice on your fiction and you don’t accept it.
I hadn’t published anything yet. I was trying to write, but nothing was really working out. And the whole time I was living with Susan and David, I wasn’t able to write. But because she kept pushing me, I did finally show her a story I’d written. She was generous in her comments and she encouraged me to think I was someone who could become a writer. But for the most part, whenever she tried to criticize my work, I didn’t take it well.
Unfortunately, I was like a lot of my own students, who don’t really want criticism, just encouragement. It’s both embarrassing and hilarious to remember it now. You don’t sit there at twenty-five, unpublished, inexperienced, and respond to Susan Sontag’s editorial suggestions like a little snot, rejecting every one of them. But it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t admire Susan’s own fiction. I’d read her first two novels and some of her stories, and I didn’t admire them the way I admired the essays. So when she tried to talk to me about language and style, I didn’t really trust what she said. Anyway, she was offended, of course, and she didn’t forget either. Years later, she’d ask me to send her my work and when I did she refused to say anything about it.
Can you explain the cult of Susan Sontag?
I think it had everything to do with the way she first appeared on the scene, this brilliant, beautiful, intellectually passionate young woman writing these sharp, confident pieces about art and culture, in a style all her own. She was brainy but also sexy, totally bookish but also a party girl—a rare and pretty irresistible combination. She captured the media’s attention right away, and then, because she was so active and productive and had such a broad range of interests, and also because she was always so vocal and fearless about her opinions—no few of which were controversial—attention kept getting paid. It would have been hard for Susan Sontag not to have a high profile. Whatever she said, people quoted her. And people always wanted to interview her and photograph her. Being a lifelong world traveller was part of it, too. And of course it had everything to do with gender. It was such an unusual life for a woman. I mean, if you think about it, she was pretty much the only woman of her kind.
Why did you decide to write this memoir now?
I’d never thought about writing about Susan, ever. But about three years ago, the writer Elizabeth Benedict asked me if I’d write something for an anthology called Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Influenced Them. I wanted to write about Elizabeth Hardwick, who’d been my teacher at Barnard. But it turned out both Elizabeth Benedict and Mary Gordon were already writing about her. Then it occurred to me I could write about Susan, because even though she wasn’t a professor of mine, she was certainly a major influence.
I’d already published a short memorial piece a year after her death, and then for the anthology I wrote this twenty-page essay, which was also published in Tin House. James Atlas read it and asked me if I’d be willing to write a book about Susan, and I thought I could do that so long as it was a short book. I would never have been interested in writing a biography or a critical study, but I saw the possibility of a short memoir, taking off from the two essays I’d already written and limited to that particular time when I got to know her well, and what it meant to be a young writer under her influence. But otherwise I’m sure I’d never have written a book about her.
Were you concerned about Susan’s privacy?
Yes, but for a number of reasons less so than I might have been about some other public figure. For one thing, though you hear it said about Susan that she was a very private person, she was in fact the least private person I’ve ever known. She told everyone everything: the most intimate details about her life, all about her personal history, the people she knew, famous or unfamous, what she thought of everyone and everything—she had no use for secrecy or even for discretion. And it was never as if I was her special confidante. Whatever she shared with me she shared with many others as well.
Also, so much about her private life has now been published. I’m thinking of David’s book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, about her last struggle with cancer, which also draws a portrait of the kind of person Susan was at home. And now the first volume of her journals is out, an extremely self-revealing book, in which you can see clearly the same person—though much younger—that I was writing about. Her ferocious ambition, her neediness and vulnerability, her lack of maternal feeling, her anxiety about her sexuality, and her sense of herself as a failure at love—it’s all there.
Was this easier to write than fiction?
In many ways, yes, and not just because it’s short. Unlike most of my novels, it didn’t require any research. And I didn’t have to invent anything. I had my heroine, and I had my story. I just had to do the work of memory and shape what I remembered into a narrative that would be engaging for the reader.
Do you trust your memory?
No one’s memory is infallible, of course—quite the opposite. But I do have a good memory, and in this book I only put down what I remembered very well. The time I was writing about was extremely important and vivid to me; it changed my whole life. And it’s not like it all happened way back when and afterwards I didn’t think about it for the next thirty years. These are experiences that are part of me, that have stayed alive in me, and that have informed my work as well as my relationships with other people. And you know how it is with memory. You might not remember what you had for dinner last night, but you remember everything about one particular summer of your youth. It’s like that.
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3 Comments

  1. Neil S. | April 8, 2011 at 12:58 pm
    I wonder what Mr. Rieff thinks of the book, since it seems to be as much about him as his mother.
  2. Beryl Furman | June 7, 2011 at 2:59 am
    How could I order this intresting book about intresting personalities?
    I live in Finland.
  3. Thessaly La Force | June 7, 2011 at 11:34 am
    Beryl, I recommend trying Amazon in the US. Here’s the link. Good luck!

2 Pingbacks

  1. [...] Zegt Sigrid Nunez die een tijdje bij Susan Sontag en haar zoon inwoonde. Ze schreef haar herinneringen neer in sempre Susan – Interview in The Paris Review. [...]
  2. [...] The Paris Review, Thessaly La Force interviews Sigrid Nunez about her short new book, which covers her relationship with Susan Sontag and Sontag’s son, [...]

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Sigrid Nunez

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sigrid Nunez
Born 1951
New York City, New York
Occupation writer
Nationality American
Sigrid Nunez (born 1951) is an American writer.

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[edit] Biography

Sigrid Nunez is the daughter of a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. She was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University. After finishing school she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. She has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University and the New School, and has been a visiting writer at Baruch College, Washington University, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the United States. She is the 2012 Writer in Residence at Vassar College. In fall 2012 she will teach a course in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. Nunez lives in New York City.

[edit] Work

Nunez is the author of six novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including three Pushcart Prize volumes and four volumes of Asian American literature. Among the journals she has contributed to are The New York Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and O: The Oprah Magazine.
Nunez’s major preoccupations as a novelist have been language, memory, identity, class, and writing itself. She was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in spring, 2005. Among her other honors are a Whiting Writers’ Award and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature.

[edit] Bibliography

  • A Feather on the Breath of God (1995)
  • Naked Sleeper (1996)
  • Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998)
  • For Rouenna (2001)
  • The Last of Her Kind (2006)
  • Salvation City (2010)
  • Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag (2011)

[edit] External links

[edit] Webpage


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