Sigrid Nunez on the Good Lie

“I want the reader to know that my novels are works of imagination. On the other hand, I want to lie so well that they think everything really did happen just as I say it did, and I do any number of things to make this seem to be the case. Plus, the narrator is unnamed, which makes a reader even more likely to think that she is in fact Sigrid.”

Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.