When you were watching someone die, it is a kind of rehearsal.

You watch someone die, you are watching yourself die.

I mean, this is the one thing that you know you are not going to escape.

And you see that person there in the bed getting weaker, dying, going away.

You know, it is the way it's going to happen to you.

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast.

I'm your host, Megan Dow.

My guest is novelist Sigrid Nunez, the author of seven novels as well as a memoir.

Sigrid's 2018 novel, The Friend, won the National Book Award for Fiction and became a bestseller.

That book featured an unnamed narrator caring for the dog of a close friend who had died.

This fall, she has a new novel, What Are You Going Through?

It's also about a friendship, this time between the narrator and an old acquaintance who's facing

terminal cancer and has asked the narrator to be with her as she lives her final days before

self-administering life-ending drugs. The novel, like so much of Sigrid's work, is quiet on the surface,

but absolutely churning with ideas about the nature of existence, of human behavior,

and the tension between wanting human connection and craving solitude.

Sigrid spoke with me about this work, as well as about her past work, not only the

friend, but also Salvation City, a novel she published a decade ago about a global flu pandemic

and its effect on civilization.

Sigrid Nunez. Welcome to the Unspeakable podcast. Thank you for having me.

So congratulations on the novel. What are you going through? It's about a lot of things.

And I guess we should say that the title comes from Simone Wild.

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