On Self-Belief and Risking Everything

In a new collection of stories, It Will Come Back to You, Sigrid Nunez explores between-states, from life stages like adolescence and aging to the reversals that day-to-day existence brings. In one of the most powerful stories in the collection, “Airport Story,” a woman ends up stranded and disoriented in an airport when her flight is delayed. 

“So innocently, so unexpectedly, the woman loses her sense of identity through no fault of her own,” Nunez says, “because of this strange but totally ordinary situation in an airport. You’re going along and you think, ‘This is life, this is me, this is how things are,’ and suddenly it’s like you leave the ground. You’re walking on air and you don’t know how you got there. You also don’t know how and when you’re going to come down.”

Born in 1951 in New York City, Nunez has written nine novels and a memoir, Sempre Susan, about her relationship with Susan Sontag. Nunez’s novel The Friend (2018) won the National Book Award for Fiction and was made into a film with Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. What Are You Going Through (2020) was adapted by director Pedro Almodóvar into The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. It Will Come Back to You is Nunez’s first collection and brings together stories published over the last thirty years. In addition to the National Book Award, her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize in Literature. 

Nunez talked with me about writing as a between-state, being death-haunted, and why she should have become an animal trainer.

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Your work is often about liminality, times when we find ourselves in some kind of intermediate state. When do you feel in between? The first thing that comes to mind is that I feel very much in bardo when I’m writing. It’s a desirable state of suspension, one where I forget myself. The painter Philip Guston, quoting John Cage, said that when you’re in your art studio and you start painting, everyone is in there with you: the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and, above all, your own ideas. But as you continue painting, they start to leave, one by one, until you’re left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave. 

As we travel in the bardo between birth and death, the choices we make influence our trajectory. How did you shape your path as a writer, from when you were just starting out to the tremendous success you’re having now? It took a long time for things to happen. I wasn’t getting published, wasn’t making money. There was a certain amount of humiliation to endure. I would go to the dentist and he’d say, “Oh, you’re still writing? Haven’t you been working on that book for about fifteen years?” (No, I wasn’t working all that time on one book.) Once I was at a dinner party and someone said, “What do you do?” When I said I was a writer, this woman asked, “What name do you write under?” In front of the whole table!

Was your family supportive? My parents were quite reasonably worried about how I expected to make a living. And somebody I was close to and trusted, a boyfriend who was a psychiatrist and who really liked the work I was doing, said, “Sometimes you have to give up a dream in order to move on.” By that time, I was in my late 30s. Things were going very badly, and I was in tears a lot. 

When he said that, you didn’t think you might give up? No. I knew it was a loving thing to say and he wasn’t trying to sabotage me. And, of course, he was not wrong, but as it turned out, about me, he was wrong. I knew writing was what I was supposed to be doing.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead urges us to embrace our authentic nature in bardo, to live in alignment with our true selves. How did you stay the course despite the difficulties you encountered? For me, it was a question of self-belief. I became less and less risk-averse, and I thought, “Well, I’m not going to stop now.”

Part of it was something that didn’t occur to me until a few years ago, when I was doing an interview for The Paris Review. My father, who was Chinese-Panamanian, was a gambler, not unto ruination, but he gambled the way many Asian men gamble. I realized I’d inherited that trait, that it was in my DNA to dare to keep writing even when I wasn’t having any success and so much time was passing. In other words, I was willing to gamble with my future and risk everything in the hope that I’d reach my goal in the end.

I just kept going, and opportunities and encouragement started to come: a story accepted by a little magazine, some small award, a person I greatly respected saying of something I wrote, “This is really good.”

And then you started getting your books published. My first book, A Feather on the Breath of God, was very, very, very hard to get published. It was rejected by one editor after another; I can’t recall just how many. It finally got accepted when I was 42, and it came out when I was 44, which is considered quite late for a debut.

From that time, I made an effort to organize everything around my writing. It helped to be in a place like New York—I found flexible jobs proofreading, teaching ESL, whatever. I took time off to go to residencies, where I’d meet other writers who were supportive, telling me that my writing was good. 

But I should give credit here to Susan Sontag, who came into my life after I graduated from the MFA program at Columbia. For her, writing was like a religious vocation, an exalted and even heroic profession, and the best job in the world. A person who wanted to write had to be super serious, ready and willing to make large sacrifices, without the promise or expectation of money or fame. 

From her I felt that I was being given permission to do this unjustifiable thing of devoting my life to writing, while everyone else was concerned with how I was going to make a living and when I was going to find a husband and settle down.

Do you think you’ll stop writing someday? I’m thinking of stopping. Or limiting it, not writing as much as I have been, because it’s so all-consuming.

When Philip Roth stopped writing fiction, he started going to concerts, seeing his friends. Do you feel drawn to that? I do, to be able to do all these things that people do when they retire. Sontag was appalled by such an idea. The word “retire” made her very sick. But that’s because all the time that she was writing, she was going to concerts and movies and out with her friends! She was famous for that. But I never could do it all. I feel like I’ve missed a lot. 

The bardo teachings are about awareness that everything changes and ends, including us. Is there a point at which you became aware of mortality? I’ve always been death-haunted. Part of the reason for that is that my mother was raised in Nazi Germany and came of age during the Second World War. She met my father when he was serving over there with the occupying forces, and he brought her here, to Brooklyn.

Ours wasn’t a religious household, so we kids didn’t hear anything about people seeing each other again in heaven. Death was just a plain boiled fact of life.

My mother had seen a lot of death, and even when we kids were very young, she’d tell us stories about people who were killed in the war. She would also speak matter-of-factly about the deaths of people in our community. “Oh, Mrs. Rodriguez’s father died,” she’d say. Almost as if it were no big thing. There was never any discussion of what death meant. And ours wasn’t a religious household, so we kids didn’t hear anything about people seeing each other again in heaven. Death was just a plain boiled fact of life. 

You say death haunts you. Do you mean that you fear it? Death is always on my mind, and always part of my work. But I think of myself as somebody who’s not afraid of death. The idea of moving on has not terrified me yet. If you reach a certain age, you can feel like you’ve lived your given life, and though, of course, there’s more you could see and do, you can go in peace. 

Though, to be clear, I’m very afraid of the way we die. Sontag was an example of how you don’t want to die. Kicking and screaming. Resistant to the point that she insisted on radical treatments that it was understood had almost no chance of working. I don’t have what she had, this overwhelming terror of the dark. But who knows how I’ll feel when it happens to me. I’ve heard people say they’re not afraid, and then when they’re dying, they feel completely different.

My father was a philosopher and a physician, and he wasn’t afraid of dying. What he feared was reaching the end of his life with regrets over not having lived it. Now that I’m 75, I think about regrets. I’m at a time when it’s natural to look back and think about what didn’t happen, whereas before I could think, “Well, such-and-such a thing could still happen.”

Some of my regrets are silly, like, “I always wanted to learn how to juggle but never did.” I also wish I’d learned more languages. I wish I’d spent more time in nature, and more time traveling. I also regret not having had more animals in my life. 

You couldn’t have a pet now? The problem is that the cats I used to have lived a long time, and losing them was terrible. Their final days were too much, they both suffered a lot, and I can’t go through that again, especially not alone. 

But when I think about what I might have done if I weren’t a writer—what would have made me a much happier, more fulfilled person—it’s doing some kind of work with animals. I believe I would have been a good trainer or caretaker of animals, because I’m patient with animals, much more so than with people, and I’ve always loved them a lot.

When I was having an extremely hard time trying to make it as a writer, a friend of mine brought up the “animal lady,” who was a regular on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and who used to bring various live animals on the show to talk about. My friend said, “This is what you should have done with your life. This is who you are.” I thought there was a lot of truth to that. 

I feel that particular missed chance more than I regret not having had children. Because even though I love children, I would never have had a child as a single person, ever. I would always have had to be with somebody, and no one I was ever with was somebody I wanted to have children with—or who wanted children himself. So I don’t think of it as something I regret not having done, because it wasn’t meant to happen.

The Dalai Lama says that, fundamentally, we all want to be happy. This is our common human bond as we travel in the bardo of life, whatever our circumstances. Do you feel happy now? Like so many people, I’m obsessed with current events, the sense of a world spinning out of control. The craziness and cruelty and corruption. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in it.

The world has been troubled my whole life because the world is always troubled, but things are different now. I keep expecting ever more terrible things to happen: Somebody will drop a nuclear bomb, hackers will create chaos through massive cyberattacks, destructive weather events will keep getting worse, and on and on.

People I know who are my age say, “Who wants to spend the last part of their life in this mess?” But I’m able to write, and when I’m writing, I’m able to feel like I’m doing what I should be doing despite all the bad things happening in the world.

It’s important, as well, to have a sense of humor, to still be able to see the comic aspects in things, and to be around other people who can do that too. 

The Dalai Lama is a wonderful example. He’s suffered tremendous loss, yet he calls himself a “professional laugher.” He loves joking around. That’s the way it should be. There’s nothing more human than that.