The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described.

Something is missing. Something has been lost. I believe this is at the heart of why I write.

I always wanted to be married, Lily once told me, but I never wanted to be with just one man. It had always seemed wrong to her, to expect a person to stay true to one other person—to one other body—till death did them part. To her, it was an example of society’s cruelty: to condemn the kind of excitement and adventure and human connection that could make a person feel happiest and most alive.

A cure for many ills, it’s been called. For the alleviation of stress and anxiety; for comfort in mourning, sadness, and loss: find someone who needs your help.

Anthropomorphism: we should have made it our religion, I once heard an environmental activist say.

A new fear: that enraged anti-environmentalists and climate denialists, identifying conservation efforts with their leftist, pro-government enemy, will foment ecocide, taking out their hatred on nature itself.

I thought of the depressed family therapist I once heard say that he’d met far too many people who’d somehow failed to calculate that having a baby meant one day having an adult.

You have to learn from experience what a character in a story by Edna O’Brien states: that the reason love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

Even if I did write about my own experiences, much of it would still be fiction: there is no narrative more prone to distortion than the memory of a love gone wrong.

Before beginning, too many options. Then, in the next breath, none.

For the writer, obsessive rumination is a must. Imagination must follow dark thoughts to dark places, you can’t ever just say, Stop, don’t go there.

I have this fear. I am so myopic that, without glasses, the hand I see at the end of my arm is blurred. What if I were to find myself one day in some bad place—in a prison or some kind of detention camp, say, or forced to flee for my life—and then somehow I lost my glasses, or they got broken or taken away? What then? I mentioned this once to some guests at a party and everyone cracked up. As if anything like that could ever happen to you! But think of all the people in the world to whom this has already happened, including the many who thought it never could.

Catastrophizing. A tendency to believe that the worst possible outcome is the inevitable one. The kind of wrong thinking that can lead to anxiety and depression. With the world on fire and its systems collapsing, here, there, and everywhere—with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope—what use is this diagnosis anymore?

how much of life is shaped by sadness for what’s left behind.

the names California and Colorado were synonymous with Paradise, and the dream of traveling out west was at its peak.

It was all just part of being young, it was all you needed back then, the professor told the class: to be young. You didn’t need money. You needed friends, and it was always much easier to make friends when you were young, he said, and back then making friends with all kinds of people was easier than it is today.

But, to borrow from a certain critic, in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.

Also Brian Moore’s idea that, while success makes you something that you weren’t before, failure makes you “a more intense distillation” of who you are.

“Write, live what happens,” advised Christopher Isherwood. “Life is too sacred for invention—though we may lie about it at times, to heighten it.”

Elegy plus comedy, she says, is the only way to express how we live now. And just because something isn’t funny in real life doesn’t mean it can’t be written about as if it were. Funny might even be the best way to write about it.

Asked which writers or what books I believe will still be read in a hundred years, I remember what Stephen Hawking said: Humanity has only about a hundred years left on Earth. In 2017, Stephen Hawking said that.

Rilke’s words above my desk: “I have taken action against fear. I have sat up all night writing.”

Asked: Whom would you want to write your life story? Someone with a gorgeous style and a great big loving and forgiving heart.