Sigrid Nunez

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship. A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own. In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

What Are You Going Through

Celine

This is so like you. Everything that bothered him, everything that went wrong between us, was always so like me.

He really did believe that's how it was: cach of us languaging on, our meaning clear to ourselves but to nobody else. Even people in love? I asked, smilingly, teasingly, hope- fully. This was at the very beginning of our relationship. He only smiled back. But years later, at the bitter end, came the bitter answer: People in love most of all.

Everything that a writer writes could just as easily have been different-but not until it's been written. As a life could have been different, but not until it's been lived.

[…] there are two kinds of peonle in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.

Is there anything l can do? He said it reflexively, as people always do, this formula that nobody really wants to hear, that comforts nobody. But it was not his fault that our language has been hollowed out, coarsened, and bled dry, leaving us always stupid and tongue-tied before emotion.

 When you are born into this World there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.

People ought to be able to understand that this is my way of fighting, she says. Cancer can't get me if I get me first. And what's the sense in waiting, she says, when I'm ready to go. 

You're allowed, I say - then immediately worry that she'll think I meant because you're dying. 

So what, who cares? I say - and again I wish I could unsay it, fearing that she’ll hear you’re dying.

The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you've loved grow old.

Cassie B

Lynn

Cliché stories, nothing new or groundbreaking, boring storytelling and couldn’t keep me engaged. I only finished bc I bought the audiobook and because it was short. I don’t know if it was the narration or the book itself, but I couldn’t tie many threads together. Even though this story tackles death, friendship and philosophical thoughts about life. It just fell flat for me.

Stacey Rainey 

I don't know why I read this book in the first place. It felt like a big long ramble of someone's human experience that didn't really leave me with much. Well written, but not my kind of book.

Abby N. Lewis

The vibe of this book is reminiscent of stream of consciousness in that there isn’t a solid plot throughout the novel; rather, it’s more of an overarching theme of grief and stagnation and this oppressive feeling that there is a crisis at hand yet you have no idea how to handle the crisis, let alone identify and clearly articulate the crisis. The conversations the unnamed narrator has with various other people in the book are all relayed to the reader in a secondhand manner, which gave the book a gossipy tone that I don’t think the author intended. 

Continue reading here: https://freeairforfish.com/2021/05/14...

peri

Luisa Claudia

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY NPR, PEOPLE, AND O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS’ TOP BOOK OF 2020 NATIONAL BESTSELLER “As good as The Friend, if not better.” —The New York Times “Impossible to put down . . . leavened with wit and tenderness.” —People “I was dazed by the novel’s grace.” —The New Yorker The New York Times–bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own. In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

A Novel

rida

Mitz

Omnia AlYousef 

An unexpectedly life-affirming novel about choosing to die, by National Book Award winner and bestselling author of THE FRIEND 'Love, death, friendship, compassion & SO MUCH wisdom. I just adore Sigrid Nunez' PAULA HAWKINS A woman visits a friend who is dying of cancer. Brilliant and stubborn, her friend makes a momentous request. She wishes to end her life on her own terms - and she wants the narrator's help. Stricken, she agrees. 'I promise,' says the friend, 'to make it as much fun as possible.' What follows is an extraordinary tale of a friendship put to the greatest test: to witness, unflinching, its end. It is also a portrait of the way we live now, in a world endlessly troubled by crises, and the dramatically changing nature of human relationships in our time. 'I was totally overwhelmed by this extraordinary novel. Even if it weren't about a subject dear to my heart I would be equally thrilled by its grace and profundity. Sentence by sentence it's a total joy - and sometimes, much to my surprise, laugh-out-loud funny' DEBORAH MOGGACH 'If the meaning of life is that it ends, Nunez gets to the nub of meaning in her brilliant novel. I loved it as much as The Friend' SUSIE STEINER 'When I open one of [Sigrid Nunez's] novels, I almost always know immediately: This is where I want to be ... What Are You Going Through is as good as The Friend, if not better' NEW YORK TIMES

What Are You Going Through

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