Sigrid Nunez, per a recent profile in the New York Times Magazine, is a “master of noticing.” Her novels—most recently What Are You Going Through and The Friend, both adapted for the screen and set to release this year—contain all the quotidian texture of real life, even its boredom. At the same time, her vision elevates or even enchants that reality with subtle strangeness, humor, and formal elegance. When we sat down to talk for my podcast, Thresholds, our conversation focused initially on the first book she published, A Feather on the Breath of God. That acclaimed novel, which came out in 2005, felt like a real breakthrough for her. Nunez was in her forties at the time, and had been writing for many years, but in a style that wasn’t working because it was too close to the writerly voice of one of her heroes: Virginia Woolf. We talked about that maybe too-influential relationship to Woolf, and the way Nunez broke out of it by writing a novel that grew from real life: from an attempt to write about her own Chinese-Panamanian father and German mother.

I wanted to know how she developed her touch for elevating the quotidian, and how she built the distinctive narrative voice that presides over her books—a voice that’s a lot like Sigrid’s, but isn’t quite her. There's a touch of mischief in this proximity to the real. "Well, I want to have it both ways, right?" she says. "I want the reader to know that my novels are works of imagination. On the other hand, I want to lie so well that they think everything really did happen just as I say it did."

In the first lines of your most recent book, The Vulnerables, which came out last year, you write:

“It was an uncertain spring.”

I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I’d looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t. Always instead the emphasis is on what you remembered.

I wanted to start by reading that because I love the sound of your voice in it, which is blunt and thoughtful and maybe a little contrarian. And because the ideas touch on some of the ideas that are really present in your work, and in our conversation today—the distinction between what happens and how you feel about it, the role of fiction in framing and memorializing human experience. I want to know about how you built the distinctive narrative voice that presides over your last few books, a voice that's a lot like you, but isn't quite.

My first book, A Feather on The Breath of God, is as close to autofiction as anything I've written. And I started that book by writing about my father. The first sentence came to me as a memory: "The first time I ever heard my father speak Chinese was at Coney Island." It was absolutely true, and it was interesting. And so I started writing the part of the book I would end up calling “Chang,” and as I kept writing I found myself never wanting or needing to invent anything.

At that point, I didn't know whether I had a memoir or an essay, and I didn't really care. But now I had this piece, “Chang,” and that led me to write what would become the novel’s next part, “Christa,” about my mother and how she met my father, and about their marriage and their lives as immigrants in America.

Then I thought, these two parts go together, they could make a novel. (In fact they turned out to be only the first half of Feather by the time it was published.) But again, it started with that one factual sentence, about my father. Although I do always incorporate some autobiographical elements into my work, most of it is not autofiction, and Feather contains a lot of fictional material.

This may be intuitive, but it sounds like you’re simply putting one foot in front of the other as you make the thing.

Well, I do think it's intuitive, and I have used that very phrase, putting one foot in front of the other, to describe my process. That really is how I've written all of my books. I start with something, and then I just creep along from there, and I write linearly. I write a couple pages, and then I think: What could happen next? What should happen? By the time I finish the manuscript, except for small changes, it's done, because I’ve been revising constantly all along. It’s very important for me not to go off on the wrong path for too long, because it would be very hard for me to be far into a book and then have to go back and undo everything. I really need to feel that I’m fixing whatever problems might arise while I’m in the process of writing.

Is that how you had been writing before you started working on Feather on the Breath of God? How do you sense what is enough to go on?

Most writers I know only attempt to write a story if they have the story in their head, but I never do that with a novel. In a longer work, I think there's always enough to go on because of the need to develop the characters. Who is this person? What kind of personality do they have? What do they do for a living? Why are they having dinner with that other character? You have to answer those questions. And unless you're writing a complete transcription of your own autobiographical experience, you have to start making things up.

I mean, that’s the job: creating characters that are believable and engaging, and creating a believable world for them to be in, and giving them experiences people will want to read about. Start with a character and you can go anywhere.

Yeah. You start with a very simple sentence and then trust that you can, through a process of decision making, kind of unspool it into something lifelike. I'm curious how you locate or build in that kind of lifelike quality that you're describing. Your process sounds incredibly simple, but these don't feel like simple books, nor do they read as the result of a totally straightforward decision-making process.

I think that part of it is about the language itself. Whatever you're writing, it's always made up out of words and sentences and however you structure the text.

When I was teaching, very often it happened that, when the class would agree about liking a particular part of someone’s manuscript, the writer would say: "Really? That's interesting, because that was the easiest part for me—that came the easiest." And then I would tell them about a piece of advice I remembered hearing from Mark Strand: When something comes easy to you, pay attention to it, because that’s your gift.

I know that my writing is working for me when I'm writing fairly fluently, even if it's also hard. Some part of it feels easy in the sense that it's moving—there’s the feeling of I want to stay here, this feels real. And I have enough experience as a writer now to know when I'm in the place I need to be.

Did you have to learn how to find and trust that sense when you're in the right place? You used the word experience. I'm curious how that was cultivated.

It really is largely about experience in the sense of practice. The more you write, the more practice you get, the more experienced you are, and—hopefully—the more confidence you have in what you’re doing.

I'm one of those people who at some point in their early writing life had a writer that they loved too much. In my case, it was Virginia Woolf. I read her for the first time in college and she immediately became an obsession—so much so that, for a long time, everything I wrote was bad Virginia Woolf. And of course it wasn’t any good. But I know that being steeped so deeply in the work of a literary genius must also have done me an enormous amount of good. It might have delayed my finding my own voice, but I don’t regret it at all.

There’s certainly nothing Woolfian about A Feather in the Breath of God. I didn't consciously say, okay, now I'm going to write in a different style. I didn't know what the form was going to be, I didn't even know whether it was going to be fiction or nonfiction. But the fact that it was in the first person and that it began with a true story about my father meant that I was after a certain authenticity, which demanded a voice and a style that was completely different from Woolf’s.

Tell me more about this narrator who is not you, but is some kind of deep expression of your voice, that spans so many of your works at this point?

In several of my books I’ve used a hybrid form, part fiction, part nonfiction. Feather has this form, and that’s why I had so much trouble getting it published: people didn’t seem to know what to make of it. I’ve often used a first person narrator who happens to be a woman around my age, who lives alone in New York, who is also a writer, who reads a lot and who teaches writing and literature. So clearly, even if it's not auto fiction or strictly autobiographical, there is that identification between author and narrator. Plus, the narrator is unnamed, which makes a reader even more likely to think that she is in fact Sigrid.

And it’s true that in those parts of a novel where the narrator is reflecting on something, be it some book she’s read or a movie she’s seen or something she’s observed about human nature—whatever—those are in fact my own reflections. But there’s also a fictional narrative about experiences that I myself have never had. Sometimes, switching to nonfiction, I’ll take a moment to reflect on the fictional story I’m telling. For the most part, though, there’s far more fiction than nonfiction in my novels. We all went through the pandemic, including me, but nobody asked me to take care of their parrot, as happens to the narrator of The Vulnerables. I just made all that up.­­­

Is there a pleasure in leaving people to wonder which of these things have happened to you and which of these things have not?

Well, I want to have it both ways, right? I want the reader to know that what they’re reading is fiction and not memoir. I want them to know that my novels are works of imagination. On the other hand, I want to lie so well that they think everything really did happen just as I say it did, and I do any number of things to make this seem to be the case.

I also want to ask you about animals. You have these books, these two major recent works, and one turns around a dog and the other turns around a parrot. And I'm curious, is there something in particular about thrusting a pet into a story that you like?

Oh, definitely. I think people really do respond to animals in literature, but most writers don't want to include them as characters because they're afraid. They're afraid they'll look silly or sentimental or whatever. But why? Introduce an animal into a story, and you've got an opportunity for two things. One is warmth, because so many of us share tender feelings toward animals. And the other is humor, because people often see animal behavior—of pets in particular—as comical. And if you’re writing about heavy topics such as suicide and grief and the ordeal of the pandemic, as I’ve done, it certainly helps to have some opportunities for lightness, and writing about animals can give you that.

That's such an important point. In life and in fiction, animals are a shortcut to a slightly warmer, more grounded, and certainly sometimes more absurd way of thinking.

Comedy is such an important part of human life and experience that, when there's a lack of any humor in a novel, it feels as though something essential has been left out. ♦