The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez, a book review
The Vulnerables
Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead Books, New York 2023
I realized I was a title or two behind some of my favorite authors and have been putting down holds at the local library at a furious pace. I was first introduced, literally, to Sigrid Nunez at Breadloaf and have since really enjoyed her work.
She is not your stereotypical memoirist or novelist—but has cunningly combined the two. She blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction by writing what some has termed the autobiographical novel or autofiction—a kind of hybrid.
In a hybrid there are liberal doses of the “real” and invented parts. Poetic license. Where we as readers assume she is writing about herself, while she is aware of constructing a story that makes sense, which means playing with the facts. Often “real life” is too strange and convoluted to appear real. Subtext gives it a little more credibility.
Often in her “novels” the narrator is herself a writer. She often writes about writing, and in The Vulnerables, which takes place during the pandemic, the narrator states that she is blocked: unable to find her writing voice or the ability to concentrate. Life, itself, its perimeters and terminus is about all she can navigate at the moment. She takes walks in the near empty Central Park and on the abandoned sidewalks of New York City. She has taken over a friend’s apartment, tasked with watching over her pet parrot. Thus, the narrator is given a directive, something outside her shrinking world, outside herself and headspace. She spends time nurturing the parrot—until: paradise is broken by the intrusion of another person in the apartment.
The definition of autofiction is a kind of fictionalized autobiography. Could be, sorta, maybe true. Some of my favorite authors doing this kind of things are
Deborah Levy
Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation: A Novel and Weather
Lily Tuck, The Double Life of Liliane
Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
Édouard Louis, History of Violence
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
James Baldwin, Go Tell it On the Mountain
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
to name a few
In the last 20 or so pages of the “novel,” Nunez riffs on Joe Brainard’s I Remember, a collection of remembrances. The narrator is so enamored of the book that she uses it as a jumping off point for writing prompts with her students (yes, Nunez is herself a writer and instructor at The New School Graduate Writing Program.
Joe Brainard is part of the second-generation of The New York School, poets 2.0. He and Ron Padgett were high school friends and both eventually carved out a path to New York City and the circle that included Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, and others. Joe didn’t easily fall into any category. As an artist he mostly worked on design elements incorporating collage and other mediums (see Nancy comics). I Remember also works off the same process—an assemblage of memories of growing up in Tulsa, OK with an awareness of being queer (only they didn’t call it that exactly, mostly he knew he liked boys). You don’t have to be from the Midwest or gay or grow up in the 40s or 50s to find something in common with Joe’s remembrances. It is about coming of age, of first times, of misunderstandings of the adult world, of being curious, afraid, ready for anything, unsure of yourself. In The Vulnerables the narrator grows wistful, nostalgic thinking back over her life. As I mentioned, it is a book written during and about the pandemic when at any moment people of a certain age, vulnerables, those in large cities, in congregant settings are prime candidates for the plague. The ones most likely to die.
I can relate. There’s something about not dying that sets us on a course to living, to tick off the bucket list. We remember all that we wished for, hoped for, longed for—and, in remembering, try to rectify or come to terms with our future, for what’s next.
Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead Books, New York 2023
I realized I was a title or two behind some of my favorite authors and have been putting down holds at the local library at a furious pace. I was first introduced, literally, to Sigrid Nunez at Breadloaf and have since really enjoyed her work.
She is not your stereotypical memoirist or novelist—but has cunningly combined the two. She blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction by writing what some has termed the autobiographical novel or autofiction—a kind of hybrid.
In a hybrid there are liberal doses of the “real” and invented parts. Poetic license. Where we as readers assume she is writing about herself, while she is aware of constructing a story that makes sense, which means playing with the facts. Often “real life” is too strange and convoluted to appear real. Subtext gives it a little more credibility.
Often in her “novels” the narrator is herself a writer. She often writes about writing, and in The Vulnerables, which takes place during the pandemic, the narrator states that she is blocked: unable to find her writing voice or the ability to concentrate. Life, itself, its perimeters and terminus is about all she can navigate at the moment. She takes walks in the near empty Central Park and on the abandoned sidewalks of New York City. She has taken over a friend’s apartment, tasked with watching over her pet parrot. Thus, the narrator is given a directive, something outside her shrinking world, outside herself and headspace. She spends time nurturing the parrot—until: paradise is broken by the intrusion of another person in the apartment.
The definition of autofiction is a kind of fictionalized autobiography. Could be, sorta, maybe true. Some of my favorite authors doing this kind of things are
Deborah Levy
Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation: A Novel and Weather
Lily Tuck, The Double Life of Liliane
Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
Édouard Louis, History of Violence
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
James Baldwin, Go Tell it On the Mountain
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
to name a few
In the last 20 or so pages of the “novel,” Nunez riffs on Joe Brainard’s I Remember, a collection of remembrances. The narrator is so enamored of the book that she uses it as a jumping off point for writing prompts with her students (yes, Nunez is herself a writer and instructor at The New School Graduate Writing Program.
Joe Brainard is part of the second-generation of The New York School, poets 2.0. He and Ron Padgett were high school friends and both eventually carved out a path to New York City and the circle that included Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, and others. Joe didn’t easily fall into any category. As an artist he mostly worked on design elements incorporating collage and other mediums (see Nancy comics). I Remember also works off the same process—an assemblage of memories of growing up in Tulsa, OK with an awareness of being queer (only they didn’t call it that exactly, mostly he knew he liked boys). You don’t have to be from the Midwest or gay or grow up in the 40s or 50s to find something in common with Joe’s remembrances. It is about coming of age, of first times, of misunderstandings of the adult world, of being curious, afraid, ready for anything, unsure of yourself. In The Vulnerables the narrator grows wistful, nostalgic thinking back over her life. As I mentioned, it is a book written during and about the pandemic when at any moment people of a certain age, vulnerables, those in large cities, in congregant settings are prime candidates for the plague. The ones most likely to die.
I can relate. There’s something about not dying that sets us on a course to living, to tick off the bucket list. We remember all that we wished for, hoped for, longed for—and, in remembering, try to rectify or come to terms with our future, for what’s next.
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