The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Annotations from "The Friend" by Sigrid Nunez

I see a drunk who’s pissed himself sprawled in a doorway. I Am the Architect of My Own Destiny, his T-shirt says. Nearby, a panhandler with a handmade sign: I used to be somebody.

Office hours. The student refers to a certain fact about his life and says, But you already knew that. No, I say, I didn’t. He looks annoyed. What do you mean? Didn’t you read my story? I explain that I never automatically assume a work of fiction is autobiographical. When I ask him why he thinks I should have known that he was writing about himself, he looks puzzled and says, Who else would I be writing about?

You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing, warns Natalia Ginzburg. Turn then to Isak Dinesen, who believed that you could make any sorrow bearable by putting it into a story or telling a story about it.

In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren’t often fists.

major theme in the work of Christa Wolf is the fear that writing about someone is a way of killing that person. Transforming someone’s life into a story is like turning that person into a pillar of salt. In an autobiographical novel, she describes a recurring childhood dream in which she kills mother and father by writing about them. The shame of being a writer haunted her all her life.

Her writing was good for three main reasons: a lack of sentimentality, a lack of self-pity, and a sense of humor. (If the last sounds unlikely, try to think of a good book that, no matter how dark the subject, does not include something comic. It’s because a person has a sense of humor that we feel we can trust them, says Milan Kundera.)

About writing as self-help you were always skeptical. You liked quoting Flannery O’Connor: Only those with a gift should be writing for public consumption. But how rare to meet a person who thinks what they’re writing is meant to stay private. And how common to meet one who thinks what they’re writing entitles them not just to public consumption but to fame.

Strays is what a writer I recently read calls those who, for one reason or another, and despite whatever they might have wanted earlier in life, never really become a part of life, not in the way most people do. They may have serious relationships, they may have friends, even a sizable circle, they may spend large portions of their time in the company of others. But they never marry and they never have children. On holidays, they join some family or other group. This goes on year after year, until they finally find it in themselves to admit that they’d really rather just stay home. But you must see a lot of people like that, I say to the therapist. Actually, he says, I don’t.

I can’t explain exactly why I felt that way, but I did. And you know how it is with guilt, it’s like smoke and fire: you don’t feel it for nothing.”

Most of her narrators are women. She thinks women make better narrators because they examine their lives and feelings in ways men usually don’t, more intensely

To become a professional writer in our society you have to be privileged to begin with, and the feeling is that privileged people shouldn’t be writing anymore—not unless they can find a way not to write about themselves, because that only furthers the agenda of white supremacy and the patriarchy. You scoff, but you can’t deny that writing is an elitist, egotistic activity. You do it to get attention and to advance yourself in the world, you don’t do it to make the world a more just place.

like what Martin Amis said: deploring egotism in novelists is like deploring violence in boxers.

once had an entire class agree that it didn’t matter how great a writer Nabokov was, a man like that—a snob and a pervert, as they saw him—shouldn’t be on anyone’s reading list. A novelist, like any good citizen, has to conform, and the idea that a person could write exactly what they wanted regardless of anyone else’s opinion was unthinkable to them. Of course literature can’t do its job in a culture like that. It upsets me how writing has become so politicized, but my students are more than okay with this. In fact, some of them want to be writers precisely because of this.