It’s Fiction, Folks.
She’s the last of her kind. “Yes, I did acid – I did it all,” novelist, Sigrid Nunez, blurted out at Baruch College’s 10th anniversary celebration of the Sidney Harman writer-in-residence program. As the current residing writer, Nunez met with Baruch students, faculty and guests, to read from her latest novel, The Last of Her Kind. Although long past her druggy days, her snappy answers and sharp humor over-powered the students’ question and answer session – nothing less expected from the quirky writer.
Nunez’s debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, explores immigrant dreams and the crises of identity in the life of a young woman of mixed race. Nunez opens the novel with unflinching honesty, stating: “the first time I ever heard my father speak Chinese was at Coney Island.” Her nameless narrator – the daughter of Christa, an oppressive German mother, and Carlos, a reserved Panamanian-Chinese father – submerses herself in a life of ballet in an attempt to escape her dreadful home life. The narrator’s flashbacks of her parent’s relationship reveal a shaky marriage characterized by poverty, unhappiness, quarrels, and her father’s indifferent attitude. She eventually quits ballet after becoming anorexic. The last section of the novel deals with her condemned affair with a married Russian student in her English class. Her unnerving novel, so personal and simultaneously un-personal, emits the aura of a quirky and original writer who clearly is in command of her prose.
The hottest question to ask Nunez involved the magnitude of her personal life within the novel. Was she the narrator? Although she admitted that the novel was “more autobiographical” than any of her newer work, she explained that it was simply a “fictional biography.” She went on to say, “if I had planned to write a memoir, I would have never written it that way.” There was “so much I didn’t know of my parents, I had no choice but to make it up.” The audience, however, was not convinced and continued to press, just how much was exactly fact, and how much fiction? Nunez was not happy with the question, and her tone clearly suggested exactly that. She warned that it was “not a good idea” to question, “did this part really happen” or not. Despite her reluctance to focus on the personal, she did give some insight on her life as a writer.
Regarding her writing process, she was brutally straight-forward, as she confessed, “I don’t really plan it out.” She doesn’t “use an outline,” but rather relies on “a certain instinct.” Although this may seem unorganized and whimsical on her part, she used a great analogy to justify her style– “you don’t really know what’s going to happen in life.” She is only concerned with making her characters into believable people; “That’s my job,” she explains. As far as her expectations of her writing career, she states that “much of it is not what I expected.” She loves writing but “dealing with editors and publishers,” she jokes, “is not very pleasant.”