NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY NPR, PEOPLE, AND O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS’ TOP BOOK OF 2020 NATIONAL BESTSELLER “As good as The Friend, if not better.” —The New York Times “Impossible to put down . . . leavened with wit and tenderness.” —People “I was dazed by the novel’s grace.” —The New Yorker The New York Times–bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The … —The New Yorker
The New York Times–bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship
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.
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Story of a woman providing empathy to friends and strangers she’s encountered.
What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez is a thoughtful meditation on love, friendship, and the challenges inherent in trying to die with dignity on one’s own terms. The unnamed narrator, a college professor, is asked by a friend to accompany her for an extended stay at a lovely house in a bucolic setting. The friend, a well-known journalist, is dying of cancer, and having stopped treatment, plans to commit suicide with the euthanasia pills she’s managed to acquire. While the subject matter is grim, the novel avoids the pathos of a tear-jerker. The dying journalist is smart, acerbic, and hard-headed; the narrator is wry, reflective, and loyal, and the expected death bed scene never arrives. This is a novel about people’s need to be heard and have their personal stories and experiences acknowledged by others. In Nunez’s world, friendship and companionship are the highest values. If you’re looking for a novel heavy with plot, this isn’t it. Yet for readers who value sharp prose, intelligent observations, sly wit, and well-rendered scenes of people struggling through the joys and limitations of life, this short novel delivers. It will linger in your mind long after you’ve left the final page.
The only reason I read this book is because it was in an email from goodreads for short books that would help me reach my 2020 reading challenge
Thankfully it did get a little better for me after getting through 53%, but I didn’t love it. The entire first half was hard to follow with her jumping between people and the rambling style of writing. She completely lost me a few times like when she did a whole excerpt on the life of the Airbnb host’s new cat, but from the cat’s POV.
In general, I found it to be pretty depressing and the narrator’s tone only added to that feeling for me. It was entertaining enough for a long drive but I didn’t really see the point of it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.
The narrator speaks about how writers “break themselves into pieces over their sentences” in an attempt to get at truth. Nunez has done that here. She has gotten to the core in as few words as possible. She has filled this narrative with memories of experiences, observations and profound insights into the nature of life/living and death and even asks the question, which I have long asked, “Why shouldn’t people have the right to end their own lives?” A timely book, when so many people around the globe are dying, there is mention of a pandemic (in a book review), the far right (“Nothing is going to hasten the end of the livable planet faster than the rise of the far right”), and our climate-denying president. This is a wonderful book about relationships, aging and our ideas about death and even an intimate encounter with a cat, who tells our narrator his life story. Just a brilliant little book.