Excerpt from The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

What a preposterous thing for anyone who knows anything about Jewish history to say, one comment read.


By the time the memorial took place the shock had worn off. People distracted themselves with speculation about what it would be like to have all the wives in one room. Not to mention the girlfriends (all of whom, the joke went, wouldn't fit in one room).

Except for the slideshow loop, with its hammering reminder of lost beauty, lost youth, it was not very different from other literary gatherings. People mingling at the reception were heard talking about money, literary prizes as reparations, and the latest die, author, die review. Decorum in this instance meant no tears. People used the opportunity to network and catch up. Gossip and head-shaking over Wife Two's oversharing in memoriam piece (and now the rumor that she's turning it into a book).

Wife Three, it must be said, looked radiant, though it was a cold radiance like that of a blade. Treat me like an object of pity, her bearing announced, hint that I was somehow to blame, and I will cut you.

I was touched when she asked me how my writing was going.

Can't wait to read it, she said untruthfully.

I'm not sure I'm going to finish it, I said.

Oh, but you know he would have wanted you to finish. (Would have.)

That disconcerting habit she has of slowly shaking her head while speaking, as if simultaneously denying every word she says.

Someone semi-famous approached. Before turning away she said, Is it okay if I call you?

I left early. On my way out I heard someone say, I hope there are more people than this at my memorial.

And: Now he's officially a dead white male.

Is it true that the literary world is mined with hatred, a ­battlefield rimmed with snipers where jealousies and rivalries are always being played out? asked the NPR interviewer of the distinguished author. Who allowed that it was. There's a lot of envy and enmity, the author said. And he tried to explain: It's like a sinking raft that too many people are trying to get onto. So any push you can deliver makes the raft a little higher for you.

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.


At a conference once, you startled the packed audience by saying, Where do all you people get the idea that being a writer is a wonderful thing? Not a profession but a vocation of un­happiness, Simenon said writing was. Georges Simenon, who wrote hundreds of novels under his own name, hundreds more under two dozen pen names, and who, at the time of his retirement, was the bestselling author in the world. Now, that's a lot of unhappiness.

Who boasted of having fucked no fewer than ten thousand women, many if not most of them prostitutes, and who called himself a feminist. Who had for a literary mentor none less than Colette and for a mistress none less than Josephine Baker, though he was said to have ended that affair because it interfered too much with work, slowing that year's novel production down to a lousy twelve. Who, asked what had made him a novelist, replied, My hatred for my mother. (That's a lot of hatred.)

Simenon the flâneur: All my books have come to me while walking.

He had a daughter, who was psychotically in love with him. When she was a little girl she asked for a wedding ring, which he gave her. She had the ring enlarged to fit her finger as she grew. When she was twenty-five, she shot herself.

Q. Where does a young Parisienne get a gun?

A. From a gunsmith she read about in one of Papa's novels.


One day, in 1974, in the same university classroom where I sometimes teach, a poet announced to the workshop she was teaching that semester: I may not be here next week. Later, at home, she put on her mother's old fur coat and, with a glass of vodka in hand, shut herself in her garage.

Excerpted from The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. Copyright © 2018 by Sigrid Nunez. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.