The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is about a woman’s journey with grief after losing her best friend, an elegy of sorts. It reads like a stream-of-consciousness journal of a writer, because no non-writer would write so elegantly in a diary. The prose is unique to me. I am definitely going to read other books by this author. Many of the sorrowful passages resonated with me on a very personal level since I lost my best friend recently too. Mine just happens to be a dog, whereas her’s is a human. Regarding how we speak on what those we lost “could have” done, or what they “would have” liked:
“Would have, would have. The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you can 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.”
One entire chapter was dedicated to an ending that she had wished for, if her friend hadn’t died. I would call it meta-fiction, and it happened to be my favorite chapter. I am not a writer, so I didn’t relate to the woman in that sense. But it’s the way her thoughts were organized, how they flowed and changed as she dealt with her grief, that I felt 100% in alignment with. I understood the slow shift of her coping throughout the book. A little chaotic in the beginning, a little more accepting towards the end.
Sprinkled in to the pages of her reckoning with the loss are the stories of a new dog in her life, Apollo, who previously belonged to her best friend. I was deeply moved by how her relationship with her new canine friend grew throughout the book. In the beginning of the novel, the main character is a dutiful cat person, albeit an overall animal lover. But by the end, she fully appreciates and understands how special the bond is between humans and dogs. The woman’s transformation makes me want to reach through the pages and give her a huge hug, because she gets it. The last line of the novel, with the repeated phrase that symbolizes so much. An ode to writing, an ode to the changing of the times (for the better), and an ode to coping. Oh and of course, to dogs. :)
Some other quotes I liked (mostly regarding animals I noticed):
“Innocence is something we humans pass through and leave behind, unable to return. But animals live and die in that state…”
“The only animal that commits suicide is also the only animal that weeps.”
“Idyllic is how Kundera describes human relationships with animals. Idyllic because animals were not expelled with us from Paradise. There they remain, untroubled by such complications as the separation of body and soul, and it’s through our love and friendship with them that we are able to reconnect to Paradise, albeit by just a thread.”
“They don’t commit suicide. They don’t weep. But they can fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.”
It reminds me of that D.H. Lawrence poem about wild things not feeling sorry for themselves.
“And it’s not the thought that she must miss them, but that she’s no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad. What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.”
-Sir