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“The reader,” says National Book Award-winner Sigrid Nunez, “will forgive the novelist certain things. Like, in a 400-page book, you can have a dozen flat sentences. But in a [short] story? No. You can’t.”
Twelve middling sentences, in a book of maybe 6,000, comes to an authorial hit rate of 99.8 percent. It’s a high bar. But Nunez has thrown the number out as an aside; she’s not speaking to the novel but rather to the semantic density of short fiction, which she’s been pondering in the lead up to her first ever story collection, It Will Come Back to You , out July 14 from Riverhead.
“I finished writing The Vulnerables ,” says Nunez of her 2023 novel, “and then, for me, an unusual thing happened. I had an idea for a story, I wrote it, and I was happy with it. This doesn’t usually happen. And then,” she says, “strangely enough, I had another one. And then another one. And one more. So I had a group of stories that were written very recently.”
Along with some encouragement from her agent, the hot hand convinced Nunez that she had something. She roped in the start of an unpublished novel and a few older pieces, but only those that stood the test of time without edits. “If something’s published already,” she says, “there’s something about going back and touching it that’s weird. Also, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it.”
Enjoyment counts for a lot in Nunez’s craft. There’s no central theme in It Will Come Back to You , not in the traditional sense, but on a language level, Nunez’s quirky, jigsaw puzzle paragraphs are the nodes from which hidden motifs—the overall strangeness of human society, the prevalence of severe emotional isolation, the value of creativity—emerge. This artistry is perhaps most evident during character introductions, key in short fiction, when personalities must enter the page memorably enough to keep track of but quickly enough not to derail momentum.
The first thing we learn about Ace, a love interest in “Philosophers,” is that he “often began sentences with some variant of There are two kinds of people in the world.” Ace’s teacher thinks he “looked like James Dean, which just wasn’t true, even if we knew she was really talking about his aura.”
This teacher, Mrs. Mint, “was an unhappy woman with tastefully teased hair and large, distracting breasts. Her aura was that of a woman whose husband had married her for those breasts and was now tired of her.”
Later on, in “It’s All Good,” the protagonist phones a nursing home supervisor, “though I’ve never found that woman easy to talk to. About as old as my mother but sharp as a tack, she has unusually pale, watery eyes that look like a headache is gathering behind them, and such a precious standoffish manner you get the sense that if you leaned in too close an alarm would sound.”
“I don’t understand why people don’t seem to remember what it was like to be that age. They say they do, but they don’t behave that way. They’ve completely forgotten everything.”
Not every character appears with such aplomb. But it’s remarkable how Nunez churns out these introductory descriptions, each of them a sort of Borgesian, self-contained flash fiction. “I think a lot depends on serendipity,” she says, when I ask her what makes a memorable foible. “I’m writing along and I say something about the character, and it just hits me to describe her that way in the first draft. I think it works, and I keep it. Or in subsequent drafts, it will come to me.”
(A common juncture in asking great writers about their craft. Drill down far enough, you hit the water table: explanations get muddy. “It will come to me.”)
“It’s never something that I want to pause and struggle with,” says Nunez of character intros. “If it doesn’t come to me in a natural way, it’s too forced. But you know, it can’t be a name, the color of the eyes, and the hair and the height. You need some detail about them. And you only need one if it’s strong.”
Nunez’s process here seems to rely less on technique than on pure “Imagination,” which happens to be the collection’s third story, kicking off in relevant fashion: “In walked Dick Franz with his look of a warlock…”
Published in The Sun in 2012, “Imagination,” intentionally or not, sheds light on Nunez’s creative engine. Its protagonist is a quixotic teenage girl named Elsie, who weaves dreamily through a party at her parents’ country home.
“An inventive imagination was a gift of the gods,” Nunez writes, “or a curse if you couldn’t control it. Elsie would sometimes start talking, telling a story, say, and get so carried away, piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents, that she might as well have been speaking in tongues. If you pointed this out to her, her response was to clam up.”
Nunez says she still has “a vivid memory” of what it was like to be a teenager. “I’m always surprised when I see how adults are worried about the kids,” she says. “I don’t understand why people don’t seem to remember what it was like to be that age. They say they do, but they don’t behave that way. They’ve completely forgotten everything.”
As an example, Nunez cites the average teen’s obsession with looks, like when Elsie becomes infatuated with the soirée’s 30-something bartender. “Not old enough to be her father, but close,” Nunez writes. “[Elsie] tried to imagine what she herself might look like at that age. As pretty as she was now? Prettier? (Doubtful.)”
There’s a kind of “narcissism,” says Nunez, to being young. “But it’s not unhealthy. It’s about finding yourself and trying to decide what you look like. You know, everything is a potential disaster, the end of the world. It’s wonderful, wonderful!”
Perhaps fiction writers, I venture, are forced to carry more adolescence into their careers than the average person. “I think they probably do,” says Nunez. “Being able to access what you were like as a child is one of the greatest tools that you can possibly have as a writer. I mean, brain surgeons: you want them to be very adult.”
Nunez, as befits her subject matter, is high on today’s crop of young authors.
The “wisdom” of age plays a major role in three of the collection’s closing stories but is most provoking in “The Rabbit’s Foot,” published last year by The Yale Review , in which Carmine, a downtrodden maid in a chic New York City hotel, is later criticized by her successful Ivy Leave daughter for being taken advantage of as a young woman. Nunez says the setting was inspired by Sherman Alexie’s 2017 New Yorker story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest.” Apart from the setting, and some idea of a forward time shift, Nunez began writing the piece and left the rest to improvisation.
“I usually just write my way into things,” Nunez says of her plotting. She believes that “probably all” of the stories in this collection changed direction mid-writing, which in some ways is unsurprising given the nature of putting words on a page, but in other ways points to what Nunez said before, about leaving the door open for wandering bouts of inspiration.
“It just comes to me…”
“It’s never something that I want to pause and struggle with…”
A resistance to plotting seems as if it might lead to a certain type of story, one filled with Elsie’s famous digressions (“piling it on so thick, flying off on so many tangents”). Nunez avoids this trap with writerly resolve. Once she begins drafting a short story, she says, “I definitely try to finish it. I would never start another story. I start, and I want to finish as fast as possible.”
Nunez has heard of other writers who proficiently multitask, setting down a partial manuscript while starting another, interspersing it all with stories and essays. “That’s very foreign to me,” she says. “I need as narrow a focus as possible, and as few drafts.”
With this mindset, it’s unsurprising that the protagonist of the collection’s title piece mourns today’s crisis of distractibility, calling it “a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.”
“It’s very worrying,” says Nunez. “I mean, technology in general is extremely worrying, for many different reasons. We are aware that there seems to be some kind of damage [to memory and focus]. But we don’t really know the specifics.”
The narrator of “It Will Come Back to You” wonders if these problems might be affecting younger generations more than older ones. But Nunez, as befits her subject matter, is high on today’s crop of young authors. Whatever distractions afflict contemporary novelists, she says, “I don’t think it’s a prevalent problem, that the quality of the work is going down. It’s not like we only now have bad writers. Nothing could be less true.”
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