October 5, 2020

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.

Details

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.

About Author(s)

Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels Salvation CityThe Last of Her KindA Feather on the Breath of GodFor Rouenna, and the National Book Award-winning The Friend, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Nunez lives in New York City.

Emily Gould is the author of the novel Friendship and the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She rose to prominence at Gawker in its early years and has written for the New York TimesNew YorkThe New YorkerBookforum, and many other publications.