The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

I’ve known plenty of women who brace themselves whenever they leave the house, even a few who try to avoid leaving the house. Of course, a woman has only to wait until she’s a certain age, when she becomes invisible, and—problem solved.

Like most suicides, you did not leave a note. I have never understood why it is called a note. There must be some who don’t keep it short. In German they call it an Abschiedsbrief: a farewell letter. (Better.)

Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.

She’s the kind of woman who knows fifty ways to tie a scarf was one of the first things you ever told us about her.

It’s not so much that she doesn’t look sixty as that she makes being attractive at sixty look easy.

And your own LOL-inspiring thought: Wouldn’t it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?

But how rare to meet a person who thinks what they’re writing is meant to stay private. And how common to meet one who thinks what they’re writing entitles them not just to public consumption but to fame.

The rise of self-publishing was a catastrophe, you said. It was the death of literature. Which meant the death of culture.

Mutts are what nature intended, mutts are what should exist. But what’ve we got instead? Idiot collies, neurotic shepherds, murderous Rottweilers, deaf Dalmatians, and Labs so calm you could shoot a gun at them and they wouldn’t suspect danger. Fur vegetables, cripples, morons, sociopaths, dogs with bones too thin or flesh too fat. That’s what you get when you breed dogs for the traits people want them to have.

But I believe the day when we are no longer capable of feeling it will be a terrible day for every living being, that our downward slide into violence and barbarity will be only that much quicker.

Even those aspiring writers your students seemed never to judge a book on how well it fulfilled the author’s intentions but solely on whether it was the kind of book that they liked.

You got customer reviews full of umbrage, suggesting that if a book didn’t affirm what the reader already felt—what they could identify with, what they could relate to—the author had no business writing the book at all.

Poke. Woof. I turn my head. Apollo’s gaze is deep, his mismatched ears look sharp as razors. He licks my face and does the cha-cha thing again. He wags his tail, and for the thousandth time I think how frustrating it must be for a dog: the endless trouble of making yourself understood to a human.

You want to know what you should write about. You’re afraid that whatever you write will be trivial, or just another version of something that’s already been said. But remember, there is at least one book in you that cannot be written by anyone else but you. My advice is to dig deep and find it.