Nunez on the Breath of the Audience
After reading a section from The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez gave the audience a chance to ask questions. To what extent the answers met the students’ desires is debatable.It is quite evident that Nunez shares a strong bond with the characters she has written about in her books. “I spend time imagining them [the characters],” she said. She later added, “I’m the character,” when writing. This technique not only adds dimension to the characters, but gives them a realistic quality, which, at times, can be misleading. Thus, it was not surprising that many of the audience’s questions centered around Nunez’s first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, concerning the unmistakable similarities of the narrator’s life with that of Nunez’.
Nunez made it clear that the first two parts of the book were written in accordance to her parents’ lives, but she stopped at that. Nunez didn’t distinguish the reality from the fiction for the remaining parts of the novel; she simply stated that the first two parts were true. Clearly, the writing was not meant to be a memoir of any sort. Nunez made it clear that if she was interested in writing one, she would have done extensive research. Plain and simple, Nunez prefers to write fiction. That is her genre. Not non-fiction.
“I wanted to invent,” said Nunez, explaining that it gives her a certain amount of confidence in her imagination. There is a sense of creativity that is free in the realm of fiction but bound in that of non-fiction. Despite this, the audience was determined to separate the non-fiction and the fiction. However, Nunez refused to give up the freedom that fiction had given her and let the rest of the book stay in its mysterious realm, that which is blended in reality and imagination.
So, does it really matter how closely related to the reality the rest of A Feather on the Breath of God is? After all, it is a novel and it is fiction. Nunez’ novel allows her to blur the line between reality and fantasy and if we were to separate the two aspects, her book would no longer be in her writing style.