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Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel, The Vulnerables, uses the 2020 pandemic as an inciting incident for an examination of the uncertainties and vulnerabilities that we experience during catastrophes as well as in our quotidian lives. The narrative is deceptively simple: a professor offers her apartment to a healthcare worker during the early days of the pandemic, subsequently moving into the apartment of a friend who has decamped to the suburbs. She takes over the care of a macaw named Eureka, and is unexpectedly joined by another friend’s somewhat aimless twenty-something son. The collision of these three entities, connected by chance in “an uncertain spring,” provides a variety of frictions that are both reflective and entertaining, indicative of a city that often throws one into unlikely arrangements.
Beyond this premise is a deeper exploration of the narratives we tell ourselves and each other, how we imagine we fit in our communities, and what constitutes a meaningful life, all in Nunez’s distinctive style, which is wry, intellectual, and satisfying. The truth is, we are all vulnerable, with or without global or local calamities, at every point of our lives, and our stories—funny, tragic, thoughtful, especially as the talented Nunez relates them—are critical to our resilience.
This interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
Mandana Chaffa
One of the things this novel addresses so well is how time exists within time, and how it can bend, depending on external circumstances. The pandemic (and I’d suggest 9/11 before that), unhinged time for many of us. Especially in cities like New York, we operate under a certain pace, which few things can shift. With relatively no warning, there was a severe impact on quotidian activities, but it also changed our internal sense of time, slowed it down drastically, and for a while at least, I think that equally shifted our sense of self. Would you talk about time as a catalyst for these characters and their experiences?
Sigrid Nunez
My characters experience the pandemic lockdown as so many others around the world did, as a period when time seemed not just to slow down but to stand still. You remember how people stopped being able to distinguish days of the week and started to say things like, Today is Blursday. I didn’t give any special thought to time in relation to my characters beyond that; I just wanted to recall what it was like, that feeling of being unmoored and trying to structure one’s life in that weird limbo, with no way of knowing how long it would go on. Really, it was just a big waiting game, with everything on hold as we waited and hoped for our lives to be given back to us.
Mandana Chaffa
The novel also explores what is on our minds as well as what we choose to forget (or can’t remember at all). The narrator often starts sentences with “I remember,” even though that one’s memory is often, if not inherently, unreliable. In contrast, the much younger Vetch often says “I don’t remember.” Is the act of memory generational? Or is it a victim of our overstimulated times?
Sigrid Nunez
Some years ago I met a young man who’d recently been an undergraduate at a school where I’d taught and I asked him if he’d studied with this or that professor, and he told me he couldn’t remember the names of his professors. I found that astonishing. I remember the name of every teacher I ever had with a few exceptions, going all the way back to kindergarten, and I know that’s true of many other people my age. And yet I don’t think this man is unusual. My students have a great deal of trouble remembering things, and I have to remind myself to repeat information over and over. No professor I know would ever tell students something important just once and expect them to remember it. And it was not like that when I was in college and grad school. But I don’t believe it’s about a difference in generations. I think it’s about the way we live now, completely in thrall to the internet and besieged by an overabundance of information. The neurologist Oliver Sacks compared our age of digital addiction to “a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.” I wouldn’t be surprised to hear one day, about someone who’d passed, “he googled himself to death.”
Mandana Chaffa
Vetch is a great character—and terrific name within the bouquet of flower names throughout the book—and such a parallel to Eureka, the parrot. They are both “chosen” and later abandoned by people who were apparently more into the idea of children (or pets) than the reality of commitment and putting them first above their own needs. The narrator enters into a relationship with each of them, at first with difficulty, then with a deeper connection; this also underscores how being forced out of one’s natural habitat can create greater engagement with the world at large (with some microdosing to help it along). Would you talk about what they represent, and what they indicate about our relationship with other generations and nature overall?
Sigrid Nunez
I don’t really see them as representing anything. To me, they are just two unique individuals: they are who and what they are. The three characters—the narrator, the young man Vetch, and Eureka the parrot—are thrown together for a period of time by highly unusual circumstances and inevitably relationships develop between them. But I can’t, from there, generalize about relationships between generations or between humans and nature. I will say, though, that each of them can accurately be described as a vulnerable.
Mandana Chaffa
“You’re a vulnerable. And you need to act like one.” Throughout the novel, different characters are considered to be especially vulnerable, and that word becomes a kind of poetic repetition that becomes something larger in accumulation. It also feels directed at the readers: we are all “the vulnerables,” and not solely because of pandemics or other calamities, and often the vulnerabilities come from our own internal monologues. The fears (and guilt) that kept the protagonist up at night were especially intimate and resonant, as we live in a time where there is an unmanageable anxiety that can be front row at times, or all the way back in the balcony at others, but always in the mind’s opera house. Your word and name choices are all specific and meaningful: were you always thinking about such anxieties when you considered this novel or its title? Or was that a theme that arose later?
Sigrid Nunez
I knew from the beginning that this novel would be called The Vulnerables, which tells you what was on my mind. But I never do too much planning or even thinking about what’s going to happen in a novel before I write it. Pretty much everything that happens is a result of what rises to mind in the course of writing. In this case, though, since I knew it was going to be set during a particularly fraught time, I knew that I’d be including material about the fears and anxieties specifically associated with the pandemic and lockdown.
Mandana Chaffa
“The Interlude” is a fantastic intermission that breaks the literary fourth wall. Much like its theatrical sibling, it could have been a risk to the momentum and pacing of a story. I thought it an interesting palate cleanser in that it brings a Sigrid Nunez—I don’t want to suggest it’s the true Sigrid Nunez—into the conversation, and foregrounds literary devices, prompts, and writers that further the narrative. From a craft perspective, would you talk more about this decision? (I especially enjoyed the autocorrect mangling of your name to “Sugared Nouns.” My personal favorite garbling is Mundane Chaff.)
Sigrid Nunez
Mundane Chaff! Thanks for the laugh! Actually, I wrote the interlude before I wrote the rest of the novel, and I called it “Preface to an Autobiography.” It was kind of a joke, because there was/is/never will be an autobiography of me. When I came to the end of part one, I thought these pages would fit nicely and very appropriately between it and part two.
Mandana Chaffa
Speaking of your literary references, Joan Didion—someone who blurred the lines of fiction and autofiction—is mentioned a number of times as one who wrote: “the problem with any first sentence is that you’re stuck with it, and by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” Do you ascribe to that?
Sigrid Nunez
I don’t take it literally, of course, but I know what she means. Once you start writing you find you’ve committed yourself to a certain idea, tone, style, etc., and whether you like it or not, this will powerfully determine what comes, or should come, next.
Mandana Chaffa
Early in the novel there’s a discussion about what we take away from works of art: do we remember facts or how we feel? I come down firmly on the side of “feel” though perhaps it’s because my memory doesn’t serve me as well as it used to. What about you?
Sigrid Nunez
The point I was making in regard to this was really about reading. The important thing isn’t to remember what happens in every novel you read but what you experience while actually reading it, meaning what it makes you feel emotionally and the various thoughts it brings to mind. The fictional events might be completely forgotten, and if so that’s okay.
Mandana Chaffa
Near the end of the novel, there’s a quote from famed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami: “The time for Scheherazade and the King—the storytelling time—is over.” Since The Vulnerables is an exemplar of storytelling, I’ll assume that that’s not the case for you. Is it a kind of storytelling that has ended given our current era? Or is this idea of a king of taste and a supplicant storyteller that’s at an end? What does storytelling mean to you now?
Sigrid Nunez
I don’t think the definition of storytelling has ever changed for me, and it’s not a narrow definition either. The world is full of stories and always has been. It’s impossible to imagine human life without storytelling. In fact, I put in the quote from Kiarostami because I’m a great admirer of his work and I find what he said fascinating. But what exactly is he saying? The meaning remains cryptic to me. There is a feeling, though, among many writers—and I write about this in my novel—that more and more people want to read about things that actually happened, true stories told by author or narrators who are not pretending not to be themselves, rather than about things that the author invented. People want to know: Why are you making this up? Why not say what happened? This is of course part of our cultural moment and no doubt has a lot to do with the ever-growing problem of misinformation, and with anxiety about cultural appropriation, and also our fears about the potential abuse of AI.
Mandana Chaffa
Hope also figures into the novel. There are the multiple perspectives of the Pandora myth, Nietzsche’s comment that hope is a great evil, as well as this: “According to Flannery O’Connor, people without hope don’t write novels. I am writing a novel. Therefore, I must have hope.” I do consider this is a hopeful novel, even “if the bell jar might descend again” because there’s a resilience that runs through it, as well as growth, however subtle in certain cases. How does hope figure into your life and work?
Sigrid Nunez
If there’s a scale, I’m afraid I’ve always leaned more to the pessimistic side than the optimistic one, and I feel especially pessimistic now, in this era of rolling crises to which it’s nearly impossible to see an end. But I do think what O’Connor said is true, and so as long as I’m writing novels I suppose I can be considered someone who still has hope.
FICTION
The Vulnerables
By Sigrid Nunez
Riverhead Books
Published November 7, 2023
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