Virtual Event: Sigrid Nunez

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series is thrilled to welcome acclaimed novelist SIGRID NUNEZ—author of the National Book Award–winning novel The Friend—for a discussion of her latest novel, What Are You Going Through. She will be joined in conversation by EMILY GOULD, author of the novels Friendship and Perfect Tunes.

Signed Copies

We have a limited number of signed copies of What Are You Going Through available for purchase here.

Contribute to Support Harvard Book Store

While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $3 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of What Are You Going Through on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About What Are Are You Going Through

A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own.

In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

Praise for What Are You Going Through

"Reading Sigrid Nunez’s absorbing new novel is somewhat akin to having a long conversation with someone who is telling you something very important, but is telling it in a very quiet voice. You have to really pay attention. Be assured, however, that the experience will be worth it. You will emerge calmer, meditative, more thoughtful, as if you have benefited from an excellent literary massage of sorts." —Janice Y.k. Lee, the New York Times

“Rereading What Are You Going Through, I was dazed by the novel’s grace: its creation of a narrative consciousness that, by emptying and extending itself to others, insured that its vitality would never dwindle, never dim. Nunez had captured what Woolf, in her exquisite story on aging, “The Lady in the Looking Glass,” describes as life’s ‘profounder state of being,’ ‘the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body.’” —The New Yorker