Arts & Humanities

Sigrid Nunez Takes a Walk

Sigrid Nunez ’72BC, ’75SOA is having a moment. After publishing nine novels over the last three decades, she’s just seen two of her books adapted into films. Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut The Room Next Door, based on Nunez’s 2020 book What Are You Going Through, was released last December. The Friend, based on her 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, opened in March. A lifelong New Yorker, Nunez says she draws inspiration from her frequent walks around the city. She invited us to join her for
I grew up on Staten Island, spent college and graduate school in Morningside Heights, and have lived on 13th Street since the 1980s. I’m not sure there’s any advantage to staying in the same place, but I do think there are advantages to being in New York City.
People love walking in the city precisely because, as the writer Vivian Gornick once told me, “There’s always some drama happening.” Vivian is my neighbor and one of my best friends. They let you keep a Great Dane here? Oh, no. I made that up. A certain amount of my work is autobiographical. The narrator of The Friend — who takes in her mentor’s Great Dane after the mentor dies — is about my age and my gender, teaches writing, and reads a lot. But she’s not me.
I want people to know that I have an imagination and I made this story up. I don’t want people to think that I’m just transcribing from my life. There’s the famous Nietzsche quote that says, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” It’s the healthy thing for your heart to walk quickly, but I’m walking at a thinking pace, which has to be slower. I think about what I’m going to write, and I solve problems when I’m walking.
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The success of The Friend brought more attention to my writing, and it led to many foreign translations. Before 2018, my work had been published in seven countries; now it’s around thirty-five and growing. That’s how Almodóvar came across it.
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I’m a huge fan of Almodóvar’s films. And those two actors, how they embody those characters, it was very familiar. There was a certain melancholy to it. It felt kind of natural to me. You’d have to be very foolish to expect a movie to be a faithful adaptation of your work. It’s been such a pleasure to see both of these movies, even though there were surprises when I saw them. It never occurred to me that they’d be identical to the book. A faithful adaptation: who needs it?
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