“I’m afraid we’ve left today’s youth with circumstances where there’s little room for hope.”
Interview with American writer Sigrid Nunez, published in the Slovenian Newspaper: sobotna priloga-Delo.
By Katarina Gomboc Čeh
In the winter of 2021, while browsing the library, I came across a book with a simple title, The Friend, and a Great Dane on the cover. I had never heard of the American author Sigrid Nunez before, but the blurb promised a “perfectly pitched novel.” The Friend, which was later adapted into a film of the same name starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray, tells the story of a woman who adopts her deceased friend’s dog. Beyond the bond between human and dog, the novel delves into themes of writing, grief, abuse, and friendship. The New York Times included this extraordinary book on its list of the 100 best books published since 2000.
Following The Friend (translated into Slovenian by Petra Anžlovar and published in 2021 by Aktivni mediji), came its follow-up, What Are You Going Through—this time with a cat on the cover—which was published in Slovenian in 2023. A harrowing tale of two friends, one of whom is dying of cancer while the other accompanies her through it, was adapted into the 2024 film The Room Next Door by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. With the novel The Vulnerables (translated into Slovenian this year), the author concludes her unofficial trilogy about an unnamed woman. In this last book, she finds herself quarantined in a stranger’s New York apartment with a parrot she must care for and a younger man from Generation Z.
The author’s last three novels have been translated into Slovenian, but she has written nine in total. Her first, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), is closest to autofiction and tells the story of her childhood and parents. Born in New York in 1951 to a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, she grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Staten Island with her parents and two older sisters. Her later novels explore Vietnam, loss, family relationships, friendship, social issues, even a marmoset from Bloomsbury and a fictional flu pandemic.
In 2011, she published the memoir Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, which is unique because Nunez knew Sontag personally—she dated her son and lived with them for a time.
I met Sigrid Nunez in New York, where she has lived her whole life. She chose a quiet lobby of a concert hall in the Upper West Side—her favorite neighborhood for concerts, film premieres, ballet, and opera—for our conversation.
You’ve lived in New York your whole life. How has the city changed before your eyes?
It’s changed a lot. When I went to college—first Barnard and then Columbia—the city was much more dangerous than it is today. There was a lot of crime, especially in the neighborhoods I lived in, like the Upper West Side and the Lower East Side.
But at the same time, the city was more interesting than it is now. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was very bohemian. Although New York has always been a place for the wealthy, things were still affordable back then. I always loved its vibrancy and unconventionality.
Then, in the 1980s, the city started changing. There was less crime in the neighborhoods, which of course is a good thing, but many corporations moved in, and a lot of neighborhoods lost their character—real estate was taken over by banks and big chains like CVS and Duane Reade. That’s why I have a special affection for the place where we met. It has remained almost the same, even though prices have gone up significantly.
Do you think New York is more superficial today, more shallow?
To some extent, yes. It’s a less interesting, less unconventional, more mainstream city.
There used to be this very important idea about New York —that you could come here from anywhere, with no money, no connections, and live your true self. If you were talented —like Andy Warhol, for example—you could become a great artist. You didn’t need money or influence, whereas elsewhere you wouldn’t have had a chance. The same goes for director Robert Wilson. Many people like him, who were gay, came from places where they couldn’t be themselves, let alone develop their creativity.
Today, that’s no longer the case, mainly because young people especially can no longer afford to come here and live like artists once did. Even Brooklyn, which used to be considered affordable, isn’t anymore.
Freedom and opportunity—that’s what made New York so special. And most of that is now gone.
Is the neighborhood where you live undergoing gentrification?
Oh yes, absolutely. Gentrification started in the 1980s, continued through the 1990s, and is still happening everywhere in Manhattan. I live in the West Village now, where part of the original spirit has been preserved. But the East Village, which was once considered a bohemian area, has completely changed. It’s become highly gentrified, with outrageously high rents. Much of the world that Patti Smith wrote about when she and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe were young is gone.
In The Vulnerables, you include a passage about 1968 as “the year that shattered America,” and how Joan Didion experienced that time—so intensely she sought psychiatric help. The psychiatrist’s report said she had a “fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her.” In the novel, you write: “This would describe, more or less, the current view of most Americans I know. Though I would add: an overwhelming sense of shame.”
The year 1968 was hugely significant for Americans. It was a time of massive protests, many of them related to the Vietnam War. Protesters opposed the horrific actions of U.S. foreign policy. They were part of student movements, civil rights movements… And then there were the assassinations—John Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Despite all that, there was still hope, because the movements were strong. People opposing the government felt they had power to stop it.
Now, many people feel the same way. The Vulnerables was written before Donald Trump’s second election, so it reflects feelings already present after his first term.
Trump is now, in 2025, serving a second term. What is it like to be an American citizen in 2025?
It depends who you ask. Trump wasn’t an unknown figure last year. He was very open, especially in the final days of the campaign. Everyone could see it. Information wasn’t withheld. We knew about “Project 2025,” a conservative plan to overhaul the American government. We knew his intentions, his grandiosity, narcissism, even his talk about being “a dictator from day one.” And people still bought into it.
In some ways, I experience it as a betrayal. If it had been a coup, it would be easier to bear. Less painful than the fact that people voted for this man, and that many didn’t vote at all. Even people of color, young people, women—many chose the right wing, despite Trump and JD Vance having said horrific things about immigrants, about migrants…
Trump didn’t pretend to be anyone else. I think that’s something people like about him: that he is largely what he appears to be. Not that he doesn’t lie—but with him, people feel they know what they’re getting.
So no, I don’t understand how anyone doesn’t feel ashamed. It’s your country, even if you voted for someone else. Still, we as a nation allowed this to happen. People often say Germans should be ashamed that Hitler came to power. There’s even a term, “Good Germans,” referring to those who didn’t actively support him but didn’t do anything to stop him either. They just allowed it. I feel similarly about the current situation in the U.S.
After his first term, people tried to console themselves with thoughts like, “It could be worse.” They said, “At least he doesn’t meddle in foreign affairs,” “At least he believes in America First,” “He’s not a warmonger and doesn’t seem to have imperial ambitions.” But on the day he started his second term—and this is how narcissism works—he became so grandiose he started talking about annexing Greenland, Canada, and Panama. So much for not being an imperialist. Now Trump poses an ever-growing threat—not just to America, but to the whole world.
The shame also comes from the fact that this isn’t just about us. Everything the U.S. does affects the entire world. Even those who couldn’t vote will feel the consequences —especially from Trump’s decisions on climate and health care.
Obviously, I didn’t vote for him. But it’s still my country. These are still my fellow citizens.
As a writer, how do you cope with the current political situation? Does it affect your writing?
After finishing The Vulnerables, I was thinking about what to do next. For a long time, I wasn’t satisfied with my short stories. But last spring—before the election—I wrote a few that I actually liked. That led to compiling a short story collection, which my agent loved. The collection has twelve or thirteen stories and is expected to be published in summer 2026.
While working on that, one story started growing into a novel. It’s quite different from my last three books. The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and The Vulnerables ended up forming an unofficial trilogy, narrated in first person by an unnamed writer who teaches creative writing. At the end of the third book, I felt like I had reached a conclusion —I no longer wanted to continue in that voice or structure. At one point I even thought: maybe I’ll never write another novel. Maybe I’ll just stick to short stories or criticism.
But then this new work started taking shape. It’s written in third person, the characters have names, and none of them are writers—which feels like a significant shift. I can’t say exactly where it’s heading yet, but that’s what I’m exploring now. And inevitably, the story reflects our current societal moment. I don’t think it will be overtly political, but you can’t write about the present without the texture of the time seeping into the narrative. Would you say that this trilogy is your most personal work?
Not exactly. My first book, A Feather on the Breath of God, was the most personal for me it’s at least half, if not more, practically autobiographical. There are also personal elements in For Rouenna and The Last of Her Kind, but I’d say the last three novels are more intimate.
In my earlier books, I didn’t write about what I actually do —that is, writing itself, being a writer. All my novels contain autobiographical elements, but there’s more fiction than non fiction in them, so I don’t consider them autobiographical novels. They may sound like autofiction, but they’re not.
I remember when I first came across The Friend —the cover with the dog drew me in instantly. A novel about a dog and writing? The perfect book for me. And it really was.
So I’m curious—how do animals inspire your writing? The Friend and its sequels aren’t your only books that feature animals. You also wrote Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. What led you to start writing about animals?
Most writers who write for adults don’t write about animals. I think many are afraid that animal stories might come across as too sentimental or shallow.
The Mitz novel began rather unexpectedly. I’ve long been a huge admirer of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. In the 1990s, after two of my books had already been published, a children’s book editor asked me if I’d ever considered writing for childre n—she thought I might be good at it, based on my writing. At first, I turned her down because I didn’t have any ideas. Then I remembered Mitz, the little marmoset that Leonard and Virginia Woolf had kept.
I’d come across Mitz in their letters and diaries —she appeared now and then in tiny, but charming anecdotes. So I thought: maybe I could write a children’s book about the Woolfs’ monkey. I even wrote three chapters in the style of books for young readers. But when I sent them to the editor, she flatly rejected them, saying that children’s literature must include children—which isn’t true at all! So I gave up on the idea.
But then my agent mentioned it to another editor, who liked the concept but wanted it to be “a book for children and adults.” I thought that sounded absurd and didn’t know how to go about it. Then I remembered Virginia Woolf’s Flush—a wonderful fake biography she wrote about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. That book isn’t written from the dog’s perspective, but it’s very tender. So I thought maybe I could write Mitz in that style. I pulled some things from the Bloomsbury archives, and it turned into a short work—but I truly enjoyed writing it. Writing about that little monkey—and later about the dog in The Friend—was a pure pleasure.
At first, I didn’t even plan to write about a dog in The Friend. I just began writing, and the story led me to the idea that the narrator inherits her friend’s dog. I wrote the scene where the friend’s wife, now a widow, calls her to meet—and I needed a twist in the story. Then I thought: What if she gives her the husband’s dog?
Then came the question: What kind of dog? I love Great Danes. They’re visually stunning, especially harlequin-colored ones. I imagined this enormous dog and thought about how the narrator lives in a tiny apartment like mine, where you can’t have such a big dog. That’s when I realized: this is my story. The same thing happened with What Are You Going Through —I didn’t plan to include an animal there either. Then I came to a part where the narrator is staying in an Airbnb, and I imagined her lying in bed reading. Suddenly, there was a cat.
People in the novel share stories, so I thought I’d add another one—a slightly magical one. I didn’t want the cat to talk—talking animals aren’t really my thing. But I found a way for the cat to have a voice: the cat talks all night, and in the morning, the narrator remembers just one story. So maybe it was only a dream.
That scene is only eight pages long and not directly connected to anything else in the book. I thought my editor would ask me to cut it or shorten it. But no—the first thing she said was: “I love that part with the cat.” After publication, readers started calling it “the book about cat.” They didn’t want to believe it was just a dream. They insisted the talking cat was real.
By the time I began writing the next book, I already knew there’d be another animal. And like the cat, the parrot doesn’t appear that often—but still, one UK review called the book “the book about the parrot”.
It’s amazing how animals win readers’ hearts. I wish more writers wrote about them. As for myself, I feel like I’ve closed the chapter on that with this last book —I can’t imagine writing about a hamster or a mouse.
Both The Friend and What Are You Going Through were adapted into films. Would you say that’s a dream come true for a writer?
Yes, I’d say it is. Hollywood is an important part of American culture. So many great films have come from there—some of the most beautiful ever made. Around the world, Hollywood is associated with postwar American dreams.
But the truth is, most writers end up disappointed by the film adaptations of their books. They often make the mistake of wanting to be involved in the filmmaking process —which almost never works out well.
I always hoped that my books would be made into films, though I knew it could turn out to be a bad experience. But even a bad adaptation doesn’t mean the book itself is bad.
I was lucky—not disappointed by either adaptation. I never expected the films to be exact mirrors of the books. With The Friend, I knew they’d focus on the dog’s story and leave out a lot of other things.
When I met with Almodóvar, it was clear from our conversation that he was mostly interested in the friendship between the two women—other themes in the novel mattered less to him. Interestingly, both directors added a character that doesn’t exist in the no vel: a daughter. In the book The Friend, the daughter is briefly mentioned—in the film, she becomes central. In What Are You Going Through, she’s also only briefly mentioned, but in The Room Next Door, she plays a significant role. The filmmakers of The Friend decided that the story needed this character. They told me they needed what they call a “triangle.” I don’t know much about films or screenwriting, but I understood their desire for a third character to balance the narrative.
My friend Vivian Gornick, who wasn’t impressed by The Room Next Door, asked me, “Do you really think this film represents your novel well?” But for me, that was never the question. I didn’t expect the film to be a mirror image of the novel.
When I found out that Almodóvar—one of my favorite directors—wanted to adapt What Are You Going Through, I immediately understood why. First, because of the female friendship. And second, because Spain legalized assisted dying in 2021. That’s a topic that means a lot to him; in recent years, he’s been dealing with questions of mortality. His movie Pain and Glory, which also explores aging, came out in 2019.
I have a friend whose books have been adapted multiple times, and he hasn’t been happy with any of the films. He’s afraid that if someone doesn’t read the book and only sees the film—and the film is bad—they’ll assume the book is bad too. Still, I’ve never met a writer who didn’t want a film adaptation. And I was quite lucky. All the actors —especially Naomi Watts in The Friend and Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, who play the two friends in The Room Next Door—were extraordinary.
Themes of aging and dying are also strongly present in your last three novels translated into Slovenian. How do you grapple with these issues through your writing?
When I was younger, I couldn’t imagine ever writing about aging. Why would I? Aging didn’t seem at all interesting to me at the time. You just get old, this or that happens. Nothing special. Only now that I’m older do I realize how wrong I was. Aging really isn’t boring. It’s incredibly interesting. In fact, I wish it were less interesting.
For many writers—take J. M. Coetzee, whom I also quote in The Vulnerables —this is the period when you begin to seriously engage with the big themes, like death, impermanence, loss. That’s completely natural. You write about what’s occupying your mind. For me, that became suicide, because my friends also began to think about it at a time when suicide rates were rising in the U.S. and probably elsewhere.
I knew people who were thinking of that as the way they’d leave this world. And one of them actually did. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, at just fifty-seven years old. That marked me. I began writing about someone who dies by suicide even before I i ncluded the dog in the story.
This stage of life also brings a sense of loss. I know people older than me who have buried all their friends, who have outlived their partners. When I think about it, I realize: those are my people, my generation. I too will bury my friends.
These realizations sneak into life in strange ways. In Vermont, I heard a story about a woman who went to a shelter to adopt a kitten, and they told her she was too old. She was 75 —just one year older than me. They said she could adopt a five-year-old cat or older, because—what if she dies before the kitten grows up? When I heard that story, I said to myself: “I’ll use this in my next novel.” Isn’t that both funny and sad at the same time? That’s what aging is —you suddenly start experiencing things you’d never thought about before.
In The Vulnerables, the older, unnamed first-person narrator ends up in a vacant New York apartment during quarantine with a younger man from Generation Z. How do you perceive this generation?
I think it couldn’t be harder for them. It seems to me this generation has only one big advantage—youth and the resilience that comes with it. Everything else… it’s like the world has turned against them. Of course, science has progressed. Many things th at used to cause terrible suffering can now be solved by medicine. But what I really can’t imagine is how they deal with such a flood of stimuli, with this overload of information. If I had been born later, I’d probably be using social media too, because I wasn’t a nonconformist in my youth. If my friends were doing something, I did it too. So I’m grateful that a lot of this was spared me.
When I think about these generations, what worries me most are climate change and the future they’re facing. How will leaders tackle these issues?
In 1968, we experienced what was called a Youthquake. The world turned toward the youth. It was most desirable to be under thirty. The market, the media, politics —everything revolved around young people and their ideas. Today, I feel like the world mostly exploits young people—to sell them something, to persuade them of something.
I really wish Generation Z would create a movement similar to the one from the sixties. We can laugh at the hippies—yes, some really did look ridiculous—but they had a philosophy: care for the environment, brotherhood, anti-racism, support for social equality. At parties, millionaires and workers mingled. The class divide we feel today wasn’t so pronounced back then.
It would be beautiful if young people today came together again around those same values not MAGA and consumerist values—but around ideas like community, peace, cooperation. If you look at the songs from that time, Get Together, Imagine—they all spoke about the possibility of a better world. They were anti-war, they promoted peace. What happened to those ideas?
Of course, there was also a dark side—drugs did a lot of harm—but the philosophy was right. I fear we’ve left today’s youth with conditions where there’s little room for hope. And we should be ashamed of that. It seems we care more about profit than their well-being. In the U.S., for example, education has become exorbitantly expensive. Students finish college with enormous debt. My generation didn’t have that. Universities have become corporations; instead of being scholars, students have become consumers. That was already beginning in my time, but now it’s out of control and is one of the greatest injustices young people face.
I read that you don’t consider yourself an optimistic person. And yet The Vulnerables is also a novel about hope. Where do you find hope?
It’s true—I’m not an optimist. I inherited my pessimism from my mother, who was German. She grew up during Nazism and the war. She had a wonderful sense of humor, but also a very dark view of humanity—she was aware of what people are capable of and how much horror they can inflict on each other.
And yet, I still manage to find hope. For example, during the pandemic. At that time, death was very close, and they said it would take six years to develop a proper vaccine. But in the end, they developed it in just a few months, saving so many lives, and the pandemic is now behind us.
So I say: people really are incredible. What they can achieve in art, science, technology is astonishing—and that gives me hope. They can cause a bad situation to suddenly turn around. That’s why I put the most hope in science—I must admit, more than in art.
That’s why what’s happening in the U.S. right now affects me so deeply. We survived a pandemic—together—and now… now we have to live in this nightmare. People had a choice. These elections were literally existential. Between life and death. And America cho se death. That’s how I see it. And yes—it hit me hard. I even feel a kind of betrayal. As if Americans blindly walked into a catastrophe.
Then there’s writing. As I wrote in The Vulnerables, Flannery O’Connor believed that people without hope don’t write novels. Sometimes I think: if I’m still writing, then there must be some trace of hope in me. Writing, for me, is proof that hope still exists—despite everything.