Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez (born 1951) spent decades as a respected but under-read novelist before The Friend won the National Book Award in 2018, bringing her work to the wide audience it had long deserved. Her fiction is marked by formal economy, intellectual curiosity, and a refusal to separate thinking from feeling — her narrators are typically writers or artists whose inner lives are rendered with a precision that makes conventional plot machinery unnecessary.

Life and Career

Nunez was born in New York City to a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother — a bicultural background she explored in her first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God (1995). She attended Barnard College and the Columbia MFA program. Early in her career she worked at The New York Review of Books and had a relationship with Susan Sontag; her memoir-novel Sempre Susan (2011) is a brief, unsentimental portrait of Sontag that reveals more about literary New York of the 1970s than most full-length biographies.

Her novels — Naked Sleeper (1996), Mitz (1998, about Virginia Woolf’s marmoset), For Rouenna (2001), The Last of Her Kind (2006), Salvation City (2010) — were consistently praised by critics but reached small audiences. She was a classic case of the “writer’s writer” — admired by peers, ignored by the market.

The Friend (2018) changed that. A novel about a woman who inherits a Great Dane after her writer-mentor commits suicide, it is ostensibly about grief and animals but is really about the relationship between language and loss — what can be said about the dead, what dogs understand that we don’t, what consolation literature offers (and doesn’t). It won the National Book Award and became a bestseller, propelling Nunez into public visibility at age sixty-seven.

What Are You Going Through (2020) continued in the same vein: a narrator accompanies a terminally ill friend through her final months, meditating on suffering, euthanasia, and the uses of storytelling. The Vulnerables (2023) — set during the early pandemic — explores loneliness, intergenerational connection, and a pet parrot.

Style and Themes

Nunez writes short novels of approximately 200 pages in a style that blends fiction, essay, and autobiography. Her narrators are typically unnamed women whose intelligence is the primary structural element — the books are organized around thinking, not plot. She is frequently compared to Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill, though her work predates both and has a warmth theirs sometimes lacks.

Animals recur throughout her work — not as metaphors but as genuine presences whose consciousness she takes seriously. Her treatment of writer-characters is refreshingly free of romanticization: writing is work, and writers are flawed people.

Key Works

• A Feather on the Breath of God (1995)
• The Friend (2018)
• What Are You Going Through (2020)
• The Vulnerables (2023)

Collecting Nunez

A Feather on the Breath of God (HarperCollins, 1995) is scarce in first edition — $100–$300. The Friend first edition (Riverhead, 2018) signed brings $50–$150; the National Book Award stamp adds value. Pre-Friend titles are underpriced relative to their quality. Nunez signs at readings and literary events. Her market is mature-author steady rather than speculative.