What’s left but to kill yourself, as the mentor and friend addressed only as “you” by the unnamed narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend has done (we’re not told how), shortly before the novel opens. You catch a glimpse of your flaccid torso in a full-length hotel room mirror and suddenly understand why. When you manage to wrangle one into the sack, she’s not exactly aswoon with desire. Even calling them “dear” creates complaints.

These days they find you a little gross, recoil from your kisses-charges are likely to be brought. Once it was easy to attract young acolytes who followed you around, hanging on your every literary reference. Your theories about the erotics of the classroom sounded more convincing back in the 1980s. Imagine yourself as a committed shagger of students-it’s your lifeblood! it keeps you vital!-graying out of the charisma you once possessed. She lives in New York City.These are dark days for aging male seducers, particularly those plying their trade as writing professors. Sigrid has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. In spring, 2019, she will be visiting writer at Syracuse University. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Sigrid’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian American literature.

Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and The Believer.

She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend.

Sigrid nunez the friend review