Sigrid Nunez - "What Are You Going Through" - Virtual Event

Sigrid Nunez will discuss What Are You Going Through. She will be joined in conversation by Charlotte Wood.

Presented in partnership with The American Writers Museum

Virtual event

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About the book: A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own. In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

About the author: Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna, and the National Book Award-winning The Friend, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Nunez lives in New York City.

About the interlocutor: Charlotte Wood is the author of six novels and two books of nonfiction. Her 2016 novel The Natural Way of Things won the Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year, and the Novel of the Year in her native Australia, and was joint winner of the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her 2020 novel, The Weekend, is an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Stella Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2019 Wood was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant services to literature.