Sigrid Nunez Creeps Along, Line by Line
"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."
Friends!
A few weeks have passed since our last episode, somewhat by accident. The end of summer and the beginning of the school year zoomed by in a haze of book boxes, Ricoh printer errors, orientations, sandwiches eaten standing up, unexpected travel— and little time for anything else. Nevertheless, we are back with another episode (and more to come) and this conversation is a special one. In partnership with PioneerWorks Broadcast, we’re co-presenting an interview with Sigrid Nunez, who was described accurately in a New York Times Magazine profile as “a petite woman of suspicious good cheer.”
Sigrid Nunez is a little tough to intro. I read her CV and started laughing: She’s a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Book Award winner, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novel What Are You Going Through is being adapted for film by Pedro Almodóvar (!) starring Tilda Swinton (!!) and her novel The Friend is being turned into a movie starring Naomi Watts and a Great Dane named Bing. Earlier this year I finally read the memoir she wrote about the period in her twenties when she lived with Susan Sontag (!!!) and it does not disappoint.
She is a woman who inspires many exclamation points, not just because her life is interesting and her work is lauded, but because her way of seeing feels so specific, lyric, witty. Her fiction is, I think, distinct among its peers for it’s playful, coy approach to the narrating voice, a voice which is both Sigrid and not-Sigrid.
We talk about how she constructs that voice —and her plots— line by line, feeling her way forward one sentence at a time. It’s a strangely intuitive process, and hearing her described it reminded me of E.L. Doctorow’s remark that “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
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.
We also talk about humor, the pleasure of dogs, and the years when she got completely stuck in her writing because (she later realized) she was trying to imitate Virginia Woolf. A condensed version of the interview is now up on Broadcast, and you can listen to the full conversation at the button below.
Mentioned in the episode:
Virginia Woolf
The poet Mark Strand
The pleasure of putting a Great Dane in the story
In other news:
Congratulations to Rumaan Alam, whose new novel Entitlement hit bookshelves this week and received enormous praise!
Thresholds alum Hanif Abdurraqib’s book There’s Always This Year was just long-listed for the National Book Awards, alongside alums Kaveh Akhbar, Greg Pardlo, and Rachel Kushner.
You can now preorder the next novel from , The Float Test. More than one member of the Thresholds team has read the ARC and we really recommend it. Pre-order here.
Vinson Cunningham has a new piece in The New Yorker about the erratic sports commentator Pat McAfee.
There at the desk, soaking in the cheers, making the guys in the suits seem ancient, he looked like a weathervane for the American mood.
That’s all for this week! We’ll be back soon with episodes featuring Maya Binyam, Carvell Wallace, and others.
-Jordan