Before the current exhibition of her work at the Milstein Center, Professor Kadambari Baxi mounted “Trigger Planting” at the Frieze New York art fair
Soon after Sigrid Nunez ’72 published her seventh novel, The Friend, in 2018, it became an international bestseller, winning the esteemed author the prestigious National Book Award. Now her poignant story has been reimagined for the screen.
The film — starring Naomi Watts (in film still above), Bill Murray, and a dog named Bing — is about a New York writer living in a tiny apartment who inherits a large Great Dane. (Bing and his trainer were the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, “An A-List Animal Trainer Prepares a Great Dane for His Film Début.”)
Presented this fall at the Telluride, Toronto, and New York film festivals, The Friend is the first of two entries in Nunez’s fiction-to-film good fortune. Her 2021 novel, What Are You Going Through, caught the attention of acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. He adapted it, enlisted Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (below, left to right) to star, and made The Room Next Door his English-language directorial debut. The story is told from the perspective of a woman whose friend has a terminal illness and asks the narrator to be with her until she’s ready to take a fatal dose of pills.
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The Room Next Door, which opens in theatres in December, was named the Centerpiece selection at the recent New York Film Festival and won the prestigious Golden Lion award for best film at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
Nunez’s experience with the movies has been remarkably positive. “It’s wonderful to see how true to the characters and themes of the novels the films have turned out to be,” she says. “I feel incredibly lucky and grateful.”
Writing is something I’ve always wanted to do, something that, in spite of being often frustratingly difficult, comes naturally to me and gives me enormous pleasure.
Q&A with Sigrid Nunez from Barnard Magazine, Spring 2024
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‘The House of Fiction Has Many Rooms’
This past spring, while the films were nearing the festival circuit, Nunez spoke with Barnard Magazine in a Q&A with Elizabeth Benedict ’76 on the bestselling author’s latest novel, The Vulnerables, and what drives her to write.
EB: I love The Vulnerables. Broadly, it’s about a writer who goes on long walks every day during the pandemic, attends a funeral, and takes care of a pet macaw. Like the narrators in the other recent novels, she reminds me of you. Yet even with all these similarities, it’s a novel. What makes it a novel?
SN: The Vulnerables is an invented prose narrative of book length that deals with imaginary characters and events. This fits the definition of a novel. It is true that the book contains some material that is not fictional, also that there are strong similarities between the narrator and the author. But this does not make the book either a memoir or a work of autofiction. Most of my writing falls outside traditional categories. But the house of fiction has many rooms, and there is more than one kind of novel...(continue reading)
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