The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

You have to realize that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing. Natalia Ginzburg, “My Vocation”

You will see a large chest, standing in the middle of the floor, and upon it a dog seated, with a pair of eyes as large as teacups. But you need not be at all afraid of him. Hans Christian Andersen, “The Tinderbox”

The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living? Nicholson Baker, “The Art of Fiction No. 212,” The Paris Review

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees.

Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized.

One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not t...

If the women were telling the truth—and there were some who doubted this, who thought the women might be malingering because they wanted attention or were hoping to collect disability—the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness. In other words, the women’s minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights.

This was the last thing you and I talked about while you were still alive.

But at your memorial I overheard something that would have amused you: I wish I could pray. What’s stopping you? He is.

Because it’s all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.

Lately I’ve done a lot of walking but no writing. I missed my deadline. Was given a compassionate extension. Missed that deadline, too. Now the editor thinks I’m malingering.

You were not the most depressed (think of G, of D, or T-R). You were not even—strange as it now sounds to say—the most suicidal. Because of the timing, so near the start of the year, it was possible to think that it had been a resolution.

One of those times when you talked about it, you said that what would stop you was your students. Naturally, you were concerned about the effect such an example might have on them. Nevertheless, we thought nothing of it when you quit teaching last year, even though we knew that you liked teaching and that you needed the money.

Once, you cracked us up with the line I think I’d prefer a novella of a life.

People distracted themselves with speculation about what it would be like to have all the wives in one room. Not to mention the girlfriends (all of whom, the joke went, wouldn’t fit in one room).

Is it true that the literary world is mined with hatred, a battlefield rimmed with snipers where jealousies and rivalries are always being played out? asked the NPR interviewer of the distinguished author. Who allowed that it was.

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

At a conference once, you startled the packed audience by saying, Where do all you people get the idea that being a writer is a wonderful thing? Not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness, Simenon said writing was. Georges Simenon, who wrote hundreds of novels under his own name, hundreds more under two dozen pen names, and who, at the time of his retirement, was the bestselling author in the world.

In the first writing course I ever taught, after I’d emphasized the importance of detail, a student raised his hand and said, I totally disagree. If you want a lot of details, you should watch television.

Nowadays (the table agreed) the feckless bohemian had all but ceased to exist, replaced by the hipster known for his knowingness, his consumer savvy, his palate and other cultivated tastes. And fair or not, asserted our host, opening a third bottle of wine, many writers today admitted to feelings of embarrassment and even shame about what they do.

“I hope this place is all right. It was so nice of you to come all this way.” The trip, as she knows, took less than thirty minutes, but she is a gracious woman, Wife Three.

A perfect setting, I thought when I entered and saw her at a table by the window—not using an electronic device like everyone else who was there alone (and even some who weren’t), but instead contemplating the street—for such an elegant, pretty woman. 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.

You were the department’s youngest instructor, its wunderkind, and its Romeo. You thought any attempt to banish love from the classroom was futile. A great teacher was a seducer, you said, and there were times when he must also be a heartbreaker.

Our friendship went on beyond the school year, and that summer—the same period when you began courting Wife One—we became inseparable. One day you startled me by saying we should fuck. Given your reputation, this should not have been a surprise.

Now came this blunt proposal, and I didn’t know what to think. I asked, stupidly, why. Which gave you a good laugh. Because, you said, touching my hair, we should find that out about each other. I don’t think it ever occurred to either of us that I might refuse. Among all my desires at the time—and you could call it the most ardent time of my life—one of the strongest was to put my full trust in someone; in some man. Later, I was mortified when you pronounced it a mistake for us to try to be more than friends. For a while, I faked illness.

Now, even as you completed your conquest of Wife One, our friendship grew. It would outlast all my other friendships. It would bring me intense happiness. And I felt lucky: I had suffered, but unlike others I never got my heart broken.

I don’t like men who leave behind them a trail of weeping women, said W. H. Auden. Who would have hated you.

They don’t commit suicide. They don’t weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.

Rather than write about what you know, you told us, write about what you see. Assume that you know very little and that you’ll never know much until you learn how to see. Keep a notebook to record things that you see, for example when you’re out in the street. I stopped keeping any kind of notebook or journal a long time ago.

I see a drunk who’s pissed himself sprawled in a doorway. I Am the Architect of My Own Destiny, his T-shirt says. Nearby, a panhandler with a handmade sign: I used to be somebody.

In a bookstore: a man goes from table to table, laying a hand on this book then that one without examining any one of them further. I follow him for a while, curious to see which book this method tells him to buy. But he leaves the store empty-handed.

By the time I got there the body had been covered up. All I was able to find out later was that it was a woman in her late fifties. Just before noon on a fine fall day, on a densely crowded block. How did she judge it, I wonder, so as not to hit anyone? Or was she just . . . were we all just . . . lucky. Graffiti on Philosophy Hall: The examined life ain’t worth it either.

All writers are monsters. Henry de Montherlant.

Writers are always selling somebody out. [Writing] is an aggressive, even a hostile act . . . the tactic of a secret bully. Joan Didion.

Every journalist . . . knows . . . what he does is morally indefen...

Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suf...

There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleas...

You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing, warns Natalia Ginzburg. Turn then to Isak Dinesen, who believed that you could make any sorrow bearable by putting it into a story or telling a story about it.

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. Woolf is talking about writing about her mother, thoughts of whom had obsessed her between the ages of thirteen (her age when her mother died) and forty-four, when, in a great, apparently involuntary rush, she wrote To the Lighthouse. After which the obsession ceased: I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.

In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren’t often fists.

A major theme in the work of Christa Wolf is the fear that writing about someone is a way of killing that person. Transforming someone’s life into a story is like turning that person into a pillar of salt.

Edmund Bergler was, like Freud, an Austrian Jew, and he was a follower of Freudian theory. According to Wikipedia, he believed that masochism was the root cause of all other human neuroses, that the only thing worse than man’s inhumanity to man was man’s inhumanity to himself.

It’s because a person has a sense of humor that we feel we can trust them, says Milan Kundera.)

She had me listen to tapes of testimony some of the women had given, and the drawings came alive.

We have a fourteen-year-old who was rescued last month from a house where she’d been kept chained to a cot in the basement. When the sexual abuse is compounded by captivity—that’s when the damage is most severe. At the moment this girl is unable to speak.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

Find the right tone and you can write about anything: I was reminded often of this dictum while reading the book. “More than you want to know about what goes in or comes out of a dog’s vagina, bladder and anus,” warns one customer review. In fact, most of My Dog Tulip is about what Ackerley calls her heats. Though at times the reader can’t help feeling it’s inevitable and so might as well brace for it, no act of bestiality occurs. But to say the relationship was not intimate would be a lie.

Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won’t hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much. When this happens, and to me it happens all the time (and more and more as I get older), the effect is so disheartening that I now open old favorites warily. The prose style is just as fine, the wit as sharp, the story, if anything, even more compelling than I remembered. But something has changed. The second time, I don’t find the author as likable.

His hostility toward women—had I missed that, or just forgotten it? Women are dangerous, especially women of the working class. . . . They stop at nothing and they never let go. True, Ackerley has little affection for humans in general. But the misogyny is clear. Women are bad because they are women.

Tulip’s behavioral problems are severe. A holy terror of a dog, badly trained, nervous and excitable to the point of hysteria, unsociable. She barks relentlessly, and she bites. Her behavior is so bad that it damages Ackerley’s relationships with people. Friends are dismayed that he won’t do more to discipline her. He blames “the disturbances of her psyche” on her first home, where she was left too much alone and sometimes beaten.