Sigrid Nunez

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

'Love, death, friendship, compassion & SO MUCH wisdom. I just adore Sigrid Nunez' PAULA HAWKINS

What Are You Going Through

Celine

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

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.

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. 

 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.

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.

[…] 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.

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.

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.

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

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