“It’s recognizably the same narrator,” Nunez says. It isn’t just suicide and grief that link the two novels. “I did want that quiet, intimate tone again.” There was certainly no commercial calculation. “I went back and found my voice with ‘The Friend,’” says Nunez on a phone call. Her original narrative style felt like a natural way to address her new preoccupations. Several people she knew were contemplating suicide in their middle years.
Over time, Nunez, now 69, leapt adventurously into other styles, subjects and genres, including the plot-driven “Salvation City,” about a teenage boy who survives a pandemic, and “ Sempre Susan,” a memoir of Nunez’s 1970s friendship with Susan Sontag and romantic relationship with Sontag’s son.īut when she sat down to write again, she had more private and pressing concerns. “A Feather on the Breath of God,” her debut, drew on Nunez’s childhood in the Staten Island projects but was mostly about her Chinese Panamanian father and German mother, parents with no shared language. “ What Are You Going Through,” Nunez’s new novel, carries on in that signature voice - a voice Nunez discovered after numerous false starts.
0 kommentar(er)
