The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

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

I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life.

I like that Norman Mailer said there’s a touch of writer’s block in a writer’s work every day.

Never write “I don’t remember,” Editor says; it undermines your authority. But write as if you remember everything and Reader will smell a rat.

like that Virginia Woolf said, Everything I read these days, including my own work, seems to me too long.

I like the sliver of ice in the heart that Graham Greene thought every writer must have. I have it.

I like that, at the end of his life, Darwin said he wished that he had read more poetry. That Keynes said he wished that he had drunk more champagne. That Chekhov said, It’s a long time since I drank champagne, then drained his glass and died. I like last words. Beethoven: I shall hear in Heaven. Käthe Kollwitz: Good luck, everyone.

There is a foolproof cure for writer’s block, according to a teacher I know: start with the words I remember.

For most readers I know, this is one of the joys of reading I Remember: a memoir of one person’s life that is also about a collective past. But I have also known some who’ve been irritated: I remember pillbox hats, too. So what?

remember the end of childhood. It was June. I had

finished sixth grade, it was the day of my graduation from elementary school. In September I’d be starting junior high. No more walking to school. I’d be taking the bus—not the yellow school bus I’d taken in kindergarten and first grade, but the regular city bus.

It was a happy day, it was a sad day, it was a beginning, it was an end, it was a new world beckoning, it was an old world lost to time.

Standing on a chair, my mother talking through the pins she held in her mouth—somehow she could do that without dropping or swallowing them. Another image of her: evenings in a rocking chair, bent over her embroidery—like a scene from a hundred years before. And really, it was from her, wasn’t it, that I took in, early on, how much of life is shaped by sadness for what’s left behind.

Time passing was life passing, I thought. It was life that flowed swiftly along in one direction and could not be seized or stopped. And this was something that weighed on grown-ups, an inexorable force that they feared. My life, like everyone else’s, was passing, too—I got that.

Does that mean a long novel is easier to write than a short one? Um, no. But, to borrow from a certain critic, in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.

like the poet who included in her acknowledgments her thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts and to the Guggenheim Foundation, “whose rejections prompted me to finish this book.”

I’ve always known how foolish human beings can be, the doctor said, and there’ve been anti-vaccination groups since there’ve been vaccines. But I must say, I never thought I was living in a time so perverse, among so many people so deranged, that,

faced with a choice of killing the virus or killing Dr. Fauci, they’d kill Dr. Fauci.

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.