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The Friend: A Novel Hardcover – February 6, 2018
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"A beautiful book … a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love." —Wall Street Journal
"A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory...Nunez has a wry, withering wit." —NPR
"Dry, allusive and charming…the comedy here writes itself.” The New York Times
A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.
While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.
Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRiverhead Books
- Publication dateFebruary 6, 2018
- Dimensions5.37 x 0.8 x 8.31 inches
- ISBN-100735219443
- ISBN-13978-0735219441
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Charming... the comedy here writes itself... the novel's tone in general, however, is mournful and resonant... The snap of her sentences sometimes puts me in mind of Rachel Cusk." —The New York Times
“In crystalline prose, Nunez creates an impressively controlled portrait of the ‘exhaustion of mourning.’” —The New Yorker
“Everywhere in this novel it is impossible to separate love and companionship from loss...The Friend is one of those rare novels that, in the end, makes your heart beat slower.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“A beautiful book … crammed with a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love.” —Wall Street Journal
"A meditation on reading and writing, love and loss, The Friend is a work rich in literary allusions and anecdotes….With The Friend . . . [Nunez’s] found the perfect pitch….Nunez’s prose is illuminated by a wit, warmth and wisdom all of her own. The Friend is a true delight: I genuinely fear I won’t read a better novel this year.” — The Financial Times
"A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory, what it means to be a writer today, and various forms of love and friendship... Nunez has a wry, withering wit.” —NPR
“The book is an intimate, beautiful thing, deceptively slight at around 200 pages, but humming with insight… [an] artfully discursive meditation on friendship, love, death, solitude, canine companionship and the life of an aging writer in New York. Far from being heavy going, this novel, written as a letter to the late friend, is peppered with wry observations, particularly those of a writer stuck teaching undergraduates.” –The Economist
“In this slim but pitch-perfect novel, a writer loses her best friend and mentor suddenly without explanation…Wry and moving, The Friend is a love story, a mania story, and a recovery story.” —Vanity Fair
“A poignant reflection on loss and companionship.” —Marie Claire
“[A] sneaky gut punch of a novel…a consummate example of the human-animal tale…The Friend’s tone is dry, clear, direct—which is the surest way to carry off this sort of close-up study of anguish and attachment.” —Harper's Magazine
“A wry riff on Rilke’s idea of love as two solitudes that ‘protect and border and greet each other.’”—Vogue
"With enormous heart and eloquence, Nunez explores cerebral responses to loss… The Friend exposes an extraordinary reserve of strength waiting to be found in storytelling and unexpected companionship.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Often as funny as it is thoughtful, The Friend is an elegant meditation on grief, friendship, healing, and the bonds between humans and dogs." —Buzzfeed
“A serious book about a big sloppy dog, Nunez’s seventh novel… displays the intellectual heft of her late friend’s work, but also a distinctive sense of humor and narrative momentum.” —Vulture
“A brilliant examination of the writer’s life, literary friendship, mortality, bereavement, and our relationship to animals. The novel is not easily summarized; the true rewards of this reading experience are the crystalline prose… Readers will also savor the surprising shifts in narrative focus.”—The Rumpus
"An elegant and darkly humorous meditation on grief and companionship, it's a great read — whether or not you're obsessed with canines.” —Shondaland.com
“Sigrid Nunez’s novel delivers an enthralling, emotional tale.” —Paste Magazine
"The Friend is proof that what we lack is itself a vital part of life — and that loss can lead to meaningful connections found in unlikely places. Sometimes it can take an animal to make a person understand their own humanity. And sometimes a book as unexpected as The Friend can provide as much comfort as any canine companion.” —B&N Review
“Quietly brilliant and darkly funny… [The Friend is] rigorous and stark, so elegant—so dismissive of conventional notions of plot—it hardly feels like fiction. Breathtaking both in pain and in beauty; a singular book.” —Kirkus, starred review
“Riveting… This elegant novel explores both rich memories and day-to-day mundanity, reflecting the way that, especially in grief, the past is often more vibrant than the present.” —Publishers Weekly
“Light, musing, curious, and somehow wonderfully sturdy.” –Vivian Gornick for Bookforum
“Brilliant but informal, sad yet laugh-out-loud funny… This beautiful, spare, work will not disappoint.” –Bookpage
“Nunez offers an often-hilarious, always-penetrating look at writing, grief, and the companionship of dogs.” —Booklist
"The joys of this novel lie in Nunez’s striking capacity to describe the world and its inhabitants, both human and animal. Nunez is a keen observer of behavior, and throughout the text she plants wonderful nuggets that immediately ring true yet still manage to be surprising.” —Michigan Daily
“A slow, poignant meditation on grief, rife with pithy literary myths and quotations… Literature nerds, creative writing students, and dog lovers will find this work delightful. Recommended for literary fiction collections.” —Library Journal
“Nunez’s story of a dog and his inadvertent caregiver is a darkly humorous and unsentimental tale of friendship, mourning, and solace.”—Electric Lit
“The intensity and elegance of The Friend mean two things—you cannot put it down and you will cry. In a novel about loss and the loneliness of writing and imagination, Sigrid Nunez creates an irresistible tale of love and an unforgettable Great Dane. A beautiful, beautiful book—the most original canine love story since My Dog Tulip.” —Cathleen Schine, bestselling author of They May Not Mean To, But They Do
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part One
During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision, their eyes troubled by shadows and pains.
The doctors who examined the women—about a hundred and fifty in all—found that their eyes were normal. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. If the women were telling the truth—and there were some who doubted this, who thought the women might be malingering because they wanted attention or were hoping to collect disability—the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness.
In other words, the women’s minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights.
This was the last thing you and I talked about while you were still alive. After, only your email with a list of books you thought might be helpful to me in my research. And, because it was the season, best wishes for the new year.
There were two errors in your obituary. The date you moved from London to New York: off by one year. Misspelling of the maiden name of Wife One. Small errors, which were later corrected, but which we all knew would have annoyed the hell out of you.
But at your memorial I overheard something that would have amused you:
I wish I could pray.
What’s stopping you?
He is.
Would have, would have. The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they’ll say even before I write them.
It’s true that if you cry hard enough for long enough you can end up with blurred vision.
I was lying down, it was the middle of the day, but I was in bed. All the crying had given me a headache, I’d had a throbbing headache for days. I got up and went to look out the window. It was winter yet, it was cold by the window, there was a draft. But it felt good—as it felt good to press my forehead against the icy glass. I kept blinking, but my eyes wouldn’t clear. I thought of the women who’d cried themselves blind. I blinked and blinked, fear rising. Then I saw you. You were wearing your brown vintage bomber jacket, the one that was too tight—and looked only better on you for that—and your hair was dark and thick and long. Which is how I knew that we had to be back in time. Way back. Almost thirty years.
Where were you going? Nowhere in particular. No errand, no appointment. Just strolling along, hands in pockets, savoring the street. It was your thing. If I can’t walk, I can’t write. You would work in the morning, and at a certain point, which always came, when it seemed you were incapable of writing a simple sentence, you would go out and walk for miles. Cursed were the days when bad weather prevented this (which rarely happened, though, because you didn’t mind cold or rain, only a real storm could thwart you). When you came back you would sit down again to work, trying to hold on to the rhythm that had been established while walking. And the better you succeeded at that, the better the writing.
Because it’s all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.
You posted an essay, “How to Be a Flâneur,” on the custom of urban strolling and loitering and its place in literary culture. You caught some flak for questioning whether there could really be such a thing as a flâneuse. You didn’t think it was possible for a woman to wander the streets in the same spirit and manner as a man. A female pedestrian was subject to constant disruptions: stares, comments, catcalls, gropes. A woman was raised to be always on guard: Was this guy walking too close? Was that guy following her? How, then, could she ever relax enough to experience the loss of sense of self, the joy of pure being that was the ideal of true flânerie?
You concluded that, for women, the equivalent was probably shopping—specifically, the kind of browsing people do when they’re not looking to buy something.
I didn’t think you were wrong about any of this. I’ve known plenty of women who brace themselves whenever they leave the house, even a few who try to avoid leaving the house. Of course, a woman has only to wait until she’s a certain age, when she becomes invisible, and—problem solved.
And note how you used the word women when what you really meant was young women.
Lately I’ve done a lot of walking but no writing. I missed my deadline. Was given a compassionate extension. Missed that deadline, too. Now the editor thinks I’m malingering.
I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn’t do. And after all, you were not the unhappiest person we knew. You were not the most depressed (think of G, of D, or T-R). You were not even—strange as it now sounds to say—the most suicidal.
Because of the timing, so near the start of the year, it was possible to think that it had been a resolution.
One of those times when you talked about it, you said that what would stop you was your students. Naturally, you were concerned about the effect such an example might have on them. Nevertheless, we thought nothing of it when you quit teaching last year, even though we knew that you liked teaching and that you needed the money.
Another time you said that, for a person who had reached a certain age, it could be a rational decision, a perfectly sound choice, a solution even. Unlike when a young person commits suicide, which could never be anything but a mistake.
Once, you cracked us up with the line I think I’d prefer a novella of a life.
Stevie Smith calling Death the only god who must come when he’s called tickled you pink, as did the various ways people have said that were it not for suicide they could not go on.
Walking with Samuel Beckett one fine spring morning, a friend of his asked, Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive? I wouldn’t go as far as that, Beckett said.
And weren’t you the one who told us that Ted Bundy once manned a phone for a suicide prevention center?
Ted Bundy.
Hi. My name is Ted and I’m here to listen. Talk to me.
That there was to be a memorial took us by surprise. We who had heard you say that you would never want any such thing, the very idea was repugnant to you. Did Wife Three simply choose to ignore this? Was it because you’d failed to put it in writing? Like most suicides, you did not leave a note. I have never understood why it is called a note. There must be some who don’t keep it short.
In German they call it an Abschiedsbrief: a farewell letter. (Better.)
Your wish to be cremated had been respected, at least, and there was no funeral, no sitting shivah. The obituary stressed your atheism. Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.
What a preposterous thing for anyone who knows anything about Jewish history to say, one comment read.
By the time the memorial took place the shock had worn off. People distracted themselves with speculation about what it would be like to have all the wives in one room. Not to mention the girlfriends (all of whom, the joke went, wouldn’t fit in one room).
Except for the slideshow loop, with its hammering reminder of lost beauty, lost youth, it was not very different from other literary gatherings. People mingling at the reception were heard talking about money, literary prizes as reparations, and the latest die, author, die review. Decorum in this instance meant no tears. People used the opportunity to network and catch up. Gossip and head-shaking over Wife Two’s oversharing in memoriam piece (and now the rumor that she’s turning it into a book).
Wife Three, it must be said, looked radiant, though it was a cold radiance like that of a blade. Treat me like an object of pity, her bearing announced, hint that I was somehow to blame, and I will cut you.
I was touched when she asked me how my writing was going.
Can’t wait to read it, she said untruthfully.
I’m not sure I’m going to finish it, I said.
Oh, but you know he would have wanted you to finish. (Would have.)
That disconcerting habit she has of slowly shaking her head while speaking, as if simultaneously denying every word she says.
Someone semi-famous approached. Before turning away she said, Is it okay if I call you?
I left early. On my way out I heard someone say, I hope there are more people than this at my memorial.
And: Now he’s officially a dead white male.
Is it true that the literary world is mined with hatred, a battlefield rimmed with snipers where jealousies and rivalries are always being played out? asked the NPR interviewer of the distinguished author. Who allowed that it was. There’s a lot of envy and enmity, the author said. And he tried to explain: It’s like a sinking raft that too many people are trying to get onto. So any push you can deliver makes the raft a little higher for you.
If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.
At a conference once, you startled the packed audience by saying, Where do all you people get the idea that being a writer is a wonderful thing? Not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness, Simenon said writing was. Georges Simenon, who wrote hundreds of novels under his own name, hundreds more under two dozen pen names, and who, at the time of his retirement, was the bestselling author in the world. Now, that’s a lot of unhappiness.
Who boasted of having fucked no fewer than ten thousand women, many if not most of them prostitutes, and who called himself a feminist. Who had for a literary mentor none less than Colette and for a mistress none less than Josephine Baker, though he was said to have ended that affair because it interfered too much with work, slowing that year’s novel production down to a lousy twelve. Who, asked what had made him a novelist, replied, My hatred for my mother. (That’s a lot of hatred.)
Simenon the flâneur: All my books have come to me while walking.
He had a daughter, who was psychotically in love with him. When she was a little girl she asked for a wedding ring, which he gave her. She had the ring enlarged to fit her finger as she grew. When she was twenty-five, she shot herself.
Q. Where does a young Parisienne get a gun?
A. From a gunsmith she read about in one of Papa’s novels.
One day, in 1974, in the same university classroom where I sometimes teach, a poet announced to the workshop she was teaching that semester: I may not be here next week. Later, at home, she put on her mother’s old fur coat and, with a glass of vodka in hand, shut herself in her garage.
The mother’s old fur coat is the kind of detail writing teachers like to point out to students, one of those telling details—like how Simenon’s daughter got her gun—that are found in abundance in life but are mostly absent from student fiction.
The poet got into her car, a vintage 1967 tomato-red Cougar, and turned on the ignition.
In the first writing course I ever taught, after I’d emphasized the importance of detail, a student raised his hand and said, I totally disagree. If you want a lot of details, you should watch television.
A comment I would come to see was not really as dumb as it seemed.
The same student also accused me (his words were writers like you) of trying to scare other people by making writing seem much harder than it was.
Why would we want to do that? I asked.
Oh come on, he said. Isn’t it obvious? The pie is only so large.
My own first writing teacher used to tell her students that if there was anything else they could do with their lives instead of becoming writers, any other profession, they should do it.
Last night, in the Union Square station, a man was playing “La Vie en Rose” on a flute, molto giocoso. Lately I’ve become vulnerable to earworms, and sure enough the song, in the flutist’s peppy rendition, has been pestering me all day. They say the way to get rid of an earworm is to listen a couple of times to the whole song through. I listened to the most famous version, by Edith Piaf, of course, who wrote the lyrics and first performed the song in 1945. Now it’s the Little Sparrow’s strange, bleating, soul-of-France voice that won’t stop.
Also in the Union Square station, a man with a sign: Homeless Toothless Diabethee. That’s a good one, a commuter said as he tossed change into the man’s paper cup.
Product details
- Publisher : Riverhead Books; 1st Edition (February 6, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0735219443
- ISBN-13 : 978-0735219441
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.37 x 0.8 x 8.31 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #92,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #894 in Women's Friendship Fiction
- #4,658 in Contemporary Women Fiction
- #6,164 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Sigrid Nunez was born in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father, whose lives she drew on for part of her first novel, A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD (1995). She went on to write six more novels, including THE LAST OF HER KIND (2006), SALVATION CITY (2010), THE FRIEND (2018), and WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH (September, 2020). She is also the author of SEMPRE SUSAN: A MEMOIR OF SUSAN SONTAG (2011). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize, a Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Learn more at www.sigridnunez.com.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2020
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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The main character loses a close friend to suicide. In the midst of her grief, she has the friend's big Great Dane foisted on her. She's more of a cat person, really, and the dog (Apollo) creates a whole host of problems for her. The book is written as a dialogue that's really a monologue that the main character is having with her dead friend, musing on the past and philosophizing about life. And dogs. Of course.
I've found that nearly every time someone I care about suggests that I read their "favorite" book or one that they really loved, I don't enjoy it nearly as much as they did. And then I have to figure out what to say to them that won't hurt their feelings. This includes, for example, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which I should, of course, have liked, but didn't. And The Friend. In the case of this novel, the suggester loved the book, mostly because of her own life experience (as a writer) being somewhat similar to that of its main character (in this case, she got stuck caring for the dog of a former partner and fellow writer). As someone who has been a dog's person many times, but never became one because of a relationship with a dog's person, I couldn't relate. That said, when I read a book, I jot down notes (or more lazily, place post-it notes inside it to remind me of favorite passages), and as I return to this one, I see a dozen torn blue post its, read the marked passages, and remember that I enjoyed the writing even though I couldn't relate to the plot. A few of the post-it-ted passages, (p 79) the risk of rereading beloved books--with which I completely agree, "Always the chance that it won't hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much...the effect is so disheartening that I open old favorites warily;" (p 122) rationalizing why someone didn't leave a suicide note--that doing so may have led them to losing their nerve "(He who hesitates is not lost.);" and (p 149) the Tolstoy-related reference "unhappy couples were all unhappy in the same way." Oh yeah, and the bit about the daffodil (p 184).
In summary, although I couldn't really relate to the stuck-with-the-loved-one's-dog plot, I really liked the author's storytelling skills. In fact, I debated reading Sempre Susan, but then, I didn't want to ruin my memory of Sontag's son's Swimming in a Sea of Death. So, I decided to skip it.
First the good. I truly believe that Sigrid Nunez is a tremendously talented writer. That was drilled home to me every now and then, and pretty unexpectedly, by beautifully turned sentences, flawless phrasing, and expressions that perfectly described thoughts and observations. I would be reading a paragraph and thinking “Eh, this is okay”, and then I hit a sentence or a sentiment that just stood out as a peach, and made me stop and read it a few times over just to appreciate it. Almost all of this came in the narrator’s interactions with the dog. I’d go so far as to call it poetry, but it’s not; these tend to be simple, unadorned observations that plainly express sentiments with which any dog lover will be familiar. It’s written in simple human language drenched in humanity. The author is clearly an artist with words.
Not having ever taken a course in creative writing, I also enjoyed picking out certain literary techniques that enhanced the story. I loved the way the object of the narration (the “you” in the story) changed from the recently deceased writer friend throughout 90% of the book to in the last chapter being her new friend, the dog. It drives home who “The Friend” is.
But… here’s where I’m going to gripe. I’m really pretty tired of characters who are writers constantly complaining about how hard and painful writing is, like they are this special breed of humans who suffer for their art any more than any of us suffer for our chosen profession. If writing is so hard, well, get over yourself and do something else. Quit your belly-achin’. The narrator and her dead friend both seem like arrogant, uppity snobs that I probably wouldn’t like very much if they were my personal acquaintances, both wallowing in their angst and despair. And to top off the snobbery, the constant references to other authors and literary works, dropping in names and quotes like these people only think in these superior, erudite reflections so far above the mental capacity of normal humans… it all seems like something a writing snob would do just to show off one’s superiority and literary grandiosity. Really ostentatious. It was just way too much, and every time it came up I liked the narrator less. All I could think was, get back to the dog.
Now maybe I’m missing the whole point. Maybe the point is having this dog and coming to love this dog every bit as much as she loved the deceased writer turned the narrator into a better person. The dog as a personality has so much more grace and nobility than the dead writer did, and it taught her to value those traits so much more than the literary snobbery she was so used to. Yeah, I like that explanation. If I look at it that way, maybe I liked this book more than I thought I did when I finished reading it.
Top reviews from other countries

Reading all the blurb on the covers this novel promises to be fascinating especially the relationship between woman and dog when both are plunged into grief.
An already sad and melancholic tale turned out to be a depressing and frustrating read. The dog in question, a large Great Dane hardly gets a mention until nearly halfway through the story which is low on plot.
There are far too many references to the art of writing, other writing quotations and general facts which induced tedium. I really wanted to learn more about the relationship between woman and dog and how the story unfolded but instead the book took the form more of the woman's ramblings in her diary to her late friend.
I was really hoping for something a bit special given its nomination but it's impact on me was more the might of a chihuahua.

In the case of The Friend, I think the book has been marketed under false pretences. It is NOT a book about the authors' relationship with her deceased friend's dog. The dog doesn't even get a mention until about a quarter of the way through the book. From the few sections about the dog, I would have enjoyed the book much more if it had focused on this. I get the impression that was probably the original intention, until the author realised she simply couldn't write a whole book about this topic. Help! Panicked decision to turn it into a chaotic book about fiction writing, victims of VOT, her deceased friend, suicides, and .... hmm, what else? Oh yes, the dog! Even then, the book was shorter than almost every fiction novel I have read in the past 5 years. The "structure" (I use the term loosely) of the book almost seems like the chapters of a short story about a dog were then spread apart, and "filler" chapters placed in between. Th flow of the book simply isn't linear - it's all over the place. It's like the author got lost and forgot her map of how to write a novel. Switching back and forth between first, second and third person, it's hard to tell who she is talking to sometimes - the reader? Her deceased friend? Herself (when writing in the first person as her deceased friend)?
I am so peeved at having been duped into buying this book that Ms Nunez could write a Booker prize winner and I wouldn't buy it! As she says, about halfway through the book, if no books were published for a whole year, the world would be unaffected (or words to that effect). There are too many other, much better books out there, written by much better authors, and published by much more responsible publishers, to risk wasting my money on this author again.

Sounds pretty perfect, right? Spoiler Alert! This wasn't really about the dog or the magical bond. And I kind of really wanted it to be. That's the mood I was in.
This book is "written" by an unnamed writer/narrator who is grieving the loss of her friend to suicide. She has also been tasked with taking on the responsibility of Apollo, the Great Dane that her friend left behind. This book is about moving through the grief of loss. But at no point did I ever actually 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 grief-stricken nor did it seem that 𝘴𝘩𝘦 was particularly emotional about the loss. It was all very cerebral. Lots of musings about the nature of loss. Lots of musing about the nature of writing and how the literary landscape has changed. Lots of quoting classic writers. But none of it made me 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 anything. Not for her anyway.
The few parts where the narrator focuses on the dog were touching, to be honest. Clearly Nunez knows what it means to have that connection with an animal and, for me, these got to the heart of the matter. It felt as if she needed the dog to be a conduit for the narrator's emotions. Sadly, though, Nunez didn't stick with mechanism consistently enough for this to work. Not for me, at least.
I suppose that if I wasn't led to expect something else (namely a book more focused on the woman/dog bond), I might have liked this book more. It was an easy read and there were definitely passages that made me ponder. If you're a 'writer's writer' who likes dogs, this may appeal to you. But it didn't grab me as I'd have liked.

I liked the fact that Nunez doesn't make the deceased into a saint. He actually comes across as quite an unlikeable character, without in any way diminishing the sadness of his loss or the validity of the narrator's grief.

I am unsure if the writer themselves know what they are speaking of as it is so jumpy. There is no flow to this book as you can go from one paragraph to another and be on a different topic altogether. The writer likes to speak about other writers a lot, not sure of the relevance to this story at all? I am not one to not finish a book but unfortunately I am going to have to give up on this one. A best seller? Yeah to stupid people like me who thought this book was worth a read. I am just so confused as to where this was going?!!! completely would not recommend